The big wrap up
November 2014. The big wrap up has begun. Most buildings were already there as a set of walls. Now I am completing them one at a time. This guard's house can be found at the railroad crossing of the Torenlaan, at the entrance of the former Baarn Buurtstation yard. The original was knocked down a couple of years ago when the tracks of the main line Baarn - Amersfoort were relaid. It has now been preserved as a 1:43.5 model.
The building was modelled after the situation in the late sixties / early seventies. The woodwork was painted red at the time and the house still had both its chimneys. More recent photos show a green paint-job. One or both chimneys might also have disappeared over time. Although a model is always a compromise, this one is pretty accurate.
The old black and white TV makes a nice detail. It shows a popular children's program from the era. There is small LED in the TV and you can see the tube flicker in the dark.
The guard's home as a fully detailed interior and plants in front of the windows. The plants are H0 models from Noch; they fit the windowsill nicely in this larger scale.
Also finished: the Maaskant Family Bakery. The bakery has been detailed to the bone. All rooms, the shop and the workshop have been decorated. Since there are no surviving building plans and only a handful of photos, many details will remain a guess. Nevertheless the model gives a good impression of what the real building once looked like.
Years ago I had modelled the bakery in H0 scale. Putting the models side by side reveal the big difference between H0 en 0 scales. The scale might be twice as big, but the volume is eight times as big. Quite a difference! The bakery has been placed on my layout Buitenlust. The scenery surrounding it will be completed next.
A glimpse of the technology behind the scenes. The Surface Pro tablet controls the entire layout. Currently I am using the Dutch program Koploper, which is no longer being developed. At some point I will move on to iTrain or Railroad&Co. Because everything is wireless, I can walk around with the tablet and control the layout from any position in the room.
The ECoS from ESU is the heart of the digital infrastructure. The TouchCab app on the iPhone is used as a generic remote control. With a VNC viewer I can also take over the interface of the ECoS on an iPad or laptop. The ECoS is mounted on a small rack containing the transformers and the boosters. A LocoNet Converter connects the feedback decoders, which are all Uhlenbrock LocoNet modules. The switches on the front allow the various power circuits to be switched on and off. The big red light comes on when the system is in STOP mode and the power to the track is cut.
The third building is coal trader De Ruiter. The small office is based on a handful of historic photos, showing only a part of the building. The sign on the wall was taken from one of those photos and is authentic. The interior is pure imagination.
The office faces the railroad yard. To my knowledge there where now windows on the other side. The big coal warehouse is located beyond the office, which seems pretty logical. It proved impossible to find accurate information about the De Ruiter business from any archive.
On the trader's yard you find the mess one might expect from a coal trader. Everything is covered in black dust and there are bags of coal lying around. The dead plant on the rusted barrel makes a nice detail.
The big wrap up, part 2
December 2014. Construction of the last buildings goes even faster towards the end of the year. Coal trader Rademaker's shed is right at the edge of the layout. The building has been cut in half, making the detailed interior clearly visible. This also meant more detailing than usual. Rademaker was a bit of a riddle. Hardly any information was be found in the archives. I found only one blurred photograph from the early days of the station. I took the measurements from an old drawing of the yard.
The interior breathes the atmosphere of decades past, though it is completely based on imagination. The front with the big text over the door is more or less accurate as it is based on the only photograph I found. The building has been laser cut from 3.0 mm MDF and 1.0 mm plywood.
The detailing parts come from different sources. Some I built myself, others I bought from small manufacturers like Paulo and Addie. The coal trader still lacks staff, but they are being recruited. A forklift will also be added.
The former platform office of Baarn station. The original has survived and can be found next to restaurant The General in Baarn (the former station building). After the station closed, the building became a house. Little is known of the original function. I guess it was an office for handling goods and luggage.
The model has the typical yellow stained glass windows that can still be found on the original. The chimneys also closely resemble the real thing. One of them has disappeared over time, but the model still has both chimneys.
You can see straight through the office. This meant I had to detail the interior. Nobody remembers what it looked like in there, so the interior of the model is purely based on imagination.
This little row of workers' houses exists in reality too. You can find them in the old town of Muiden, just east of Amsterdam. They're at Kloosterstraat numbers 7 to 13. I used to live at number 13 myself for years. It is the smallest of the four on the right. The ground floor of the house only measures 5 x 5 meters (about 16 x 16 feet).
The model depicts the houses as they looked when I lived there in the mid nineties. At Buitenlust they make up a small street with Bakery Maaskant. They are immediately at your left hand when you enter the hobby cave.
These houses also have a full interior, including furniture, kitchen, stairs, bathroom, etc. The curtains are a few mm from the windows, adding an sense of depth.
The gardens behind the houses are all different. Two houses have vegetable gardens, the other two gardens are overgrown with flowers and grass.
Buitenlust in print
January 2015. Continental Modeller features a full article on Buitenlust in its February 2015 issue. You can read this international magazine on your iPad. Paper copies can be ordered online from various newsstands.
2014, 2015
