MER Open House and Layout Status Report

Running at track speed north of Williams Creek. 

 Just completed a very busy model railroad weekend as part of the NMRA MidEastern Region convention. Not only did I serve as clinic chairman for the convention, I gave a clinic on my railroad and also opened the layout up for two days of open houses and one guest operating session for convention attendees. 

Everett in all of its mocked-up glory....

Of course, the weeks prior to the convention open houses were spent mostly in the basement getting the layout ready. As anyone who has hd their layout on a tour can attest, often times more progress is made in the month before the open house than the six months before!  

Current state of the "front door." It's getting there - many structures to scratchbuild.
Completing this scene is very high on the agenda for the winter! 

I started with a long list of things I'd like to get done - I'd say I managed to finish about 75% of them. I wanted the trains to run fairly reliably, and for the most part succeeded. For my part I made a real effort to get rid of all the visible foam, plaster and plywood by covering it with a coat of earth-colored latex paint. I also got a fair amount of track painted and ballasted. It's amazing how much those two simple things blended everything on the railroad together. 

While I wanted to get the "Foreign road" power we've been operating replaced with CV/SNE/CN etc... power I wasn't quite as successful at that!

We did have issues with some recently ballasted track - and one particularly troublesome set of Proto 2000 FAs. All these issues were fixed  "on the fly" during the open house. I'm more than a little thrilled to report that we had zero issues with the wireless throttles over two days of almost constant running. 

The "back aisle" had been raw plaster, plywood, and pink foam the week before the open house. Some paint, ground foam, and some extra trees made it look presentable if not "Finished."

My crew (Stic Harris, Jeff McGuirk, Ben Hom, Norm Wolf and Bob Warren) did a great job. My parents manned the upstairs. Everyone seemed to have a great time. I didn't get any photos of people gawking at the layout, but here's a few pictures showing how the railroad looks today. 

With the layout up and running it's time to turn my attention to some actual modeling projects. More on those to come in the weeks/months ahead. 

"Yes, I know the station hangs over the edge of the benchwork!" Don't know how many times I had to say that! One thing we didn't get done was the alterations to the benchwork at Essex Junction that will accommodate the station. 

Wordless Wednesday....uh, make that Friday!!!!

Progress(?) Report

I've been working on two scenery projects at once - the White River scene and the peninsula farm scene. Last night I test fitted the barn in place on the farm scene that dominates the center of the peninsula. The tree is made from a twisted wire armature with Supertree branches covered by Noch leaves and some fine ground foam for "highlights."
But, considering this is how the White River Junction scene currently looks, and I have an op session on Sunday, I guess it's time to start cleaning up!

MicroLux Hobby Acrylics

A couple of months ago many model railroaders were dismayed to learn that Testors was discontinuing production of Floquil and PollyScale acrylic paints. These paints had been a mainstay of model railroaders for years, and based on the reaction to this news in various model railroad forums and blogs many model railroaders were ready to jump off tall buildings.  
Rather than getting overly upset about it, I opted to look for an alternative. One of them landed, quite literally, in my lap as I was flipping through latest Micro-Mark catalog.
In that catalog I noticed MicroMark was coming out with a new line of hobby acrylic paints called "MicroLux." 
The are prethinned for airbrushing just like regular artists acrylic airbrush paints (from manufacturer's like Golden). 

I also noticed Micro-Mark was offering Vallejo "Model Air" airbrush paints in "railroad colors" matched to the now defunct PollyScale and Floquil lines. Vallejo is well known to military and figure modelers as one of the best acrylic paints for model building available anywhere. In the list of the Vallejo and MicroLux colors you'll find many of the old names like "Tarnished Black," "Boxcar Red," etc....
So I went ahead and ordered a few colors of both the Vallejo railroad colors and the MicroLux paints.  

I just got them, so I haven't used them yet. The Vallejo paints are actually Vallejo's line of military colors - and come in the familiar 17 mil "eye drop" bottles. Micro-Mark has determined that Vallejo "Rust" is a color match for Polly Scale "Boxcar Red" and labeled it as such. 
The line of MicroLux paints come in larger bottles - 2 oz of paint in each and are specifically matched colors. I was thrilled to read the "Made by Vallejo" labeling on the Micro-Mark bottles. 
I haven't tried airbrushing with these paints - yet - I will report back with the results, but if these spray half as well as "regular" Vallejo paints but we may have a winner.

Foreground Trees - Update

I've gotten some questions on my Crepe Myrtle trees lately, including questions on what a Crepe Myrtle plant looks like "in the wild." Rather than create another post I added a photo of a Crepe Myrtle tree in bloom to the original August 2011 post on making trees using Crepe Myrtle tips and Supertree foliage material. See it here:

http://centralvermontrailway.blogspot.com/2011/08/foreground-trees.html

Since that post appeared I've done some experimenting adding leaves to the Crepe Myrtle foreground trees - a post on that will follow shortly.

Wordless Wednesday #22

Wordless Wednesday #21