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Perry Richmond's O gauge layout
By Roger Carp
Published: Monday, July 02, 2007
 Castle Canyon, the setting for Perry Richmond's spectacular O gauge layout, hasn't changed much since Samuel Pike explored it more than a century ago. Today, however, the wild animals and backpackers share the sandstone bluffs and gurgling streams with steam locomotives and diesels like these modern-production locomotives from MTH and Lionel, respectively. Photos by Perry Richmond  Three generations of locomotives command our attention in this scene in Castle Canyon. Would you rather have a cab ride in the Mallet, the Phantom, or the Geep? I'd surely pick the futuristic Phantom (far left), always believing that Flash Gordon might show up to drive it.  Step into Perry Richmond's living room and you're immediately greeted by a 10- by 15-foot layout. If you hear some whispering and laughter under the table-top, it may be coming from his daughters and their pals, who occasionally use the area behind the two doors as a clubhouse.
Cattle bellow, and roosters crow. Water gurgles and then roars as it cascades over rocks. Thunder crashes overhead. Crickets chirp, steam locomotive whistles wail, and little girls giggle over whispered secrets.
Now close your eyes and really concentrate. Listen to the sounds of a deeper level. Men gab about driving locomotives through the desert and curse bandits for robbing their trains. Old-timers reminisce about conquering Castle Canyon and mourn the murder of a Mr. Pike.
Where, you may be wondering, does Perry live? A ghost town on the outskirts of Death Valley?
"It's just a typical day in my living room," Perry explains. "You'll hear these sounds and plenty more when you explore my O gauge layout, the Castle Canyon Railroad."
Laughter and gunfire
On some afternoons, the loudest sound you'll hear in Perry's living room is laughter. His daughters, Erika and Kali, along with a girlfriend or two, are the source.
But the girls aren't sitting on the sofa or slouching on pillows tossed onto the floor. They're hidden, and to find them you have to unlatch the "door" in the middle of the cedar planks that conceal stacks of cinder blocks used to hold up their dad's layout.
"I guess you could say that my model railroad - or at least the empty area under it - serves as a 'clubhouse,'" Perry says with a smile. He's thrilled that Erika and Kali enjoy being around his toy trains, whether they're assisting him at the controls or camping out beneath the tabletop with their friends.
Perry recalls as a youth the pleasures of hanging out with buddies while discussing the mysteries of life and school over milk and cookies. If he can nurture similar memories in his daughters by encouraging them to crawl into the nooks under his layout, then he's one happy dad.
As a boy in Massachusetts, Perry felt the romance of the Old West. Motion pictures, westerns on television, and more left Perry determined to explore the deserts and canyons of Arizona and neighboring states.
"I glance at scenes on my layout," Perry begins, "and pretend that I've gone back to the late 19th century, when the Southwest was unsettled, even dangerous territory, and railroads were coming through. Why, I can even hear the sounds of the locomotives and the voices of the laborers who laid the track and the folks who rode the trains."
The voices that Perry - and a few visitors - imagine they hear narrate a wondrous tale about a daring explorer and entrepreneur named Samuel L. Pike. In 1871, or so goes the story that Perry has woven, this adventurer trekked to the Southwest in search of the majestic and forbidden rock formations rumored to be in Castle Canyon.
"The canyon was said to be illusive," our host states, "a place perhaps stumbled upon by accident." Which is what happened to Sam Pike. After four years of hiking through the wild terrain of the Gasping Desert, he drifted into Castle Canyon: "décor tinted red," pioneers wrote, "sunlight casting beams upon her stony cliffs."
Pike gazed at the scene in awe. Then, gleefully rubbing his hands together, he began making plans.
Seven years of toil yielded a short rail line intended to bring settlers and tourists into the paradise that formerly was known only to a handful of solitary natives.
"I can hear laborers driving spikes into the sandy earth," Perry continues, "and passengers telling each other that they've never seen sights like the wind-carved buttes. Before long, though, I also hear gunfire and realize that Sam Pike's dream has violently ended."
The outlaw Judd Kodder, desperate for the gold pieces that Pike carried with him, brutally murdered the railroad owner outside the Shady Tree Saloon sometime in 1891.
Before the year was out, the voices conclude solemnly, Pike had gained revenge. Kodder's body was found crushed by a train at Mescalero Pass. Perry listens to a legend about Apache scouts seeing Pike's spirit ride swiftly on a stallion until he catches up with Kodder and drags the outlaw to the tracks just as a train passes by at full speed.
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 The craftsman responsible for the Castle Canyon Railroad, Perry Richmond.  The futuristic Lionel Phantom locomotive zips through the quaint town of Castle Canyon while a freight train led by a Lionel Chicago, Burlington & Quincy GP9 diesel meanders through on the far track. Those relaxing hobos may find themselves a bit too close to the rails for their own good.  Could that behemoth come any closer to the sandstone hills and the stately evergreen trees that line Castle Canyon? You almost expect to hear its drivers scrape against the reddish-orange rocks.  Don't you love all the details that Perry has selected - chairs, barrels, handmade staircases and ladders, plus many painted pewter figures - to bring his world to life? Water, whether in the form of falls, streams, or this pond, shows more of his talents.
Zane Grey or Louis L'Amour, the greatest of America's chroniclers of the Old West, couldn't have concocted a better story for an O gauge model railroad.
By the time Perry launched construction in May of 2002, he thought of himself as an experienced O gauger. He had built a couple of layouts already and owned a small yet colorful stable of Lionel and MTH locomotives and cars. So he was ready to move on.
"This was going to be my third layout," Perry says, "and I knew it would be a good one. I had a great story to tell, and my daughters kept pushing me to get started. Even my dad wanted to see what I could do. What better incentives could I have?"
Perry had another advantage. He was free to construct the layout wherever he chose. The lighting, the furnishings, even the configuration of his living room made it the ideal spot for the Castle Canyon RR. So Perry laid his tools there, near the cement blocks and stacks of freshly cut boards.
A different set of sounds filled the living room. Groans as Perry struggled to lift cinder blocks into place to form a sturdy and inexpensive foundation. Rips as his saw cut the shape of a tabletop out of 4- by 8-foot sections of 3/4-inch cabinet-grade plywood. High-rpm whirs as he drilled holes and fastened sections of wood together with screws.
The idea was to have the benchwork and tabletop wedged into a 10- by 15-foot corner of the living room. Once Perry had finished that task, he cut a pair of access holes into the plywood so that reaching any section of the layout wouldn't be too difficult.
Looking at everything in position against the wall, Perry recognized the need for a backdrop.
"I bought four sheets of 2-mm-thick white plastic from an industrial supplier and painted them blue. I attached this 'sky' to the wall behind the layout with nails. In some places I had to curve the corners and cover the seams with tape.
"After touching up any spots that needed more blue paint, I spray-painted on the clouds using a cardboard template I made. I highlighted the clouds with weathering powder and finished by painting on mountains. They blend the backdrop into the mountain ranges I modeled in three dimensions at the most distant part of the layout."
The form of the tabletop suggested a network of track in the shape of a large rectangle. With that image in mind, Perry consulted his favorite old book of track plans, Greenberg's Layout Plans for Toy Trains. He latched onto a plan designed for a 4- by 14-foot table and figured out how he could add a staging track, crossovers, and a reversing loop to it. Like the artist he is, Perry soon had the plan mentally "diagrammed."
A layer of cork roadbed came first, followed by section after section of new Lionel tubular track and postwar no. 022 switches. The work proceeded at a steady, somewhat quiet clip, one that would have put a smile on the face of Samuel Pike.
Creating Castle Canyon
Any tourist to Arizona, not to mention its proud residents, can recite the many attractions that draw so many visitors to that wondrous state. The Grand Canyon, the Painted Desert, the sandstone cliffs at Sedona, and the frontier town of Jerome top the typical list of must-see sights.
Perry has traveled to each of these fantastic places to gain an understanding of what the Grand Canyon State looked like a century ago when Pike built his railroad. Desert vistas, wind-carved rock formations, and sparkling waterfalls impressed him. These were among the features that he wanted to add to his version of Castle Canyon.
But Perry worried about taking on too much. So he adopted what he refers to as the "divide and conquer" philosophy. He broke down the scenery tasks he needed to accomplish to a few small steps that could be done in his spare time and on weekends.
Take the magnificent renditions of the sandstone buttes that fill the distant part of the railroad. Recollections and photographs of Sedona inspired Perry, who stacked 2-inch pieces of foam insulation on top of each other. He glued the pieces together and stuck wood barbecue skewers from the top down to make sure everything stayed secure.
Perry scrounged up a serrated steak knife from a kitchen drawer so he could ably carve the 8-foot-long mountain piles of plastic foam.
The squeaky sound of the knife's blade sinking into the soft material was followed by loud thuds as spoonfuls of wet Durham's Water Putty smacked against the foam blocks. Over several days Perry packed on four thin coats of that modeling material and then spread on a couple thick ones until he had covered the surface and was ready to paint the forms.
Important as was the shape of the rock formations, Perry knew that color was the critical factor in achieving a realistic look. He experimented with paints until he discovered a red-orange water-based latex available at Home Depot. Its texture and color transformed the foam blocks into replicas of the sandstone towers around Sedona.
Perry finished the mountains by "aging" them. Before the paint had dried, he sprinkled in crushed bits of sandstone he picked up. Then he added accents with oil-based paints and crushed chalks. The effect was good enough for a travel brochure.
The same techniques worked wonders for the valleys and desert near the canyons. Perry used rock molds from Woodland Scenics and carved foam for these scenic effects, which he painted in shades of brown to contrast them with the distant mountain peaks.
A waterfall would inject visual interest into the mountains, so Perry was eager to make one. He returned to Home Depot for sheets of clear acrylic that he sliced into strips. Having found that two-part epoxy yellowed over time, Perry chose instead to coat the strips with clear silicone. Then he dripped on Realistic Water from Woodland Scenics to make the cascading flow appear to glisten.
For the river meandering through the Castle Canyon, Perry relied on a two-part epoxy resin called Pour-On that's available at Michaels Arts & Crafts. He stirred a green acrylic paint into the resin and poured the mixture into the "bed" he had fashioned.
"I created rapids on waxed paper," Perry explains, "using a product called Water Effects from Woodland Scenics. I painted the rapids the same shade of 'river green' and added some white highlights. Then I applied Realistic Water for that shiny look.
"After placing the rapids in parts of the river, I finished painting and detailing the banks. By doing this step after I'd poured the colored resin and teased it to make waves and ripples, I made sure that it was not absorbed into the banks."
There was no reason to leave the landscape barren, not when Sam Pike had enticed individuals and families to travel to Castle Canyon and settle the rugged wilderness. Soon, therefore, Perry turned from building scenery to developing an assortment of miniature houses, businesses, and railroad facilities for his imaginary town.
New sounds, emanating from pencils, jigsaws, and glue guns, could be heard as Perry sketched ideas for structures that he scratchbuilt out of balsa and basswood. Cabins, a saloon, passenger depots, a smokehouse, a barn, and corrals, all intended to look as though they'd been erected a century ago, were among the additions.
Ideas on how to detail the different structures came from Mary Ann Campillo, who will soon marry our host. She offered positive criticism of Perry's efforts to weather his buildings with charcoal, sand, chalk, stain, wood-burning tools, and flames. |
 On a sparkling spring day in Castle Canyon, a freight ducks into a tunnel on its way to Flagstaff. In the meantime, a Santa Fe diesel tiptoes over a deck bridge, trying not to disturb the trout in the river. An old Lionel highway flasher stands guard at the tunnel.
We've accounted for the girlish laughs and the frontier gunshots that you can hear around the Castle Canyon RR, not to mention all the sounds associated with the construction of a model railroad, from benchwork to scenery. Wiring the Lionel Power Master, Power House, and Command Base proved to be quieter but no less essential.
But where did the animal sounds come from? The moos, chirps, and crowing that leave Erika and Kali giggling come from a sound effects system marketed by Model Rectifier Corp. It also produces the splashing of water, claps of thunder, and rustling of leaves.
Finally, of course, there are the trains. "My layout is set in the late 19th century," Perry says, "so you might expect nothing except old-time steamers and wood-sided cars.
"Sorry, but I've taken more than a few liberties when filling the roster of locomotives and rolling stock seen on the Castle Canyon RR. The whistles and bells heard along the tracks come from engines that span the 20th century."
Articulated RailKing steamers from MTH feature the glories and dazzling noises produced by the ProtoSound 2.0 electronics. Lionel Geeps and a Baby Train Master with RailSounds suggest what might have led boxcars and ore cars through Castle Canyon many decades after Pike's murder.
Maybe that's why the last sound visitors hear when they leave Perry's living room is a sigh of contentment. It expresses the pride he takes in an O gauge railroad where so much life and sound, real as well as imaginary, fills every square inch of a captivating realm. |
Layout at a glance
Perry Richmond's Castle Canyon Railroad
Gauge: O (O-31 maximum curves)
Setting: Arizona in the late 19th century
Dimensions: 10 by 15 feet
Track and switches: Lionel (postwar, modern)
Motive power: Lionel, MTH
Rolling stock: K-Line, Lionel (postwar, modern), MTH
Controls: Lionel, MRC transformers (TrainMaster Command Control)
Accessories: Lionel
Structures: Black Bear, scratchbuilt
Figures: Bowser |
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