Wordless Wednesday #128

New England Prototype Modelers Meet - June 3 & 4 2016

Work continues on the Demeritt Cannery and I hope to have some photos to share in the next day or two. 
I've also been getting my clinic ready for the New England Prototype Modelers Meet, which will be held in Enfield,  Connecticut June 3-4. 
This is one of my favorite model railroading events, and if you haven't gone I highly recommend it. 
You can see more details on the website - http://nerpm.org/index.html

What goes on at this meet? Well, there's the model display room. Think of it as the "town green" of the meet - where people hang out, get a chance to see some excellent models (hundreds of them!), talk with the builders, share techniques, and engage in a never ending series of bull sessions. One thing that will be nice this year is the chance to continue the bull sessions into the evening in the hotel bar/lounge!
Then there are the clinics. 
I'll be doing one clinic - my "Modeling the October Scene" clinic, an updated version of the presentation I gave at Portland NMRA last summer. 

But there are a LOT of excellent clinicians and clinics. 
One I'm looking forward to is Bill Gill's presentation (scheduled for 1:15 June 4th) on modeling specific, very common weeds found along right of ways across most of the country. Bill models in HO but says the methods are suitable across several scales. 

Here's an example of his ragweed (Three photos by Bill Gill):

He'll also cover making New England Asters (pale blue):

And common reeds:

Think I may need to take some allergy pills before sitting in on this one!

Wordless Wednesday #127

Test-fitting Demeritt Cannery

 I've completed the basic buildings for the Demeritt Cannery in Waterbury. This is one of the key structures remaining to be finished in the "front door" scene - hence the reason for focusing on it. 

Entire building is Evergreen styrene - based on the two prototype photos I managed to turn up of the building. To fit the buildings I needed to adjust the hillside behind the structure and made a Gatorboard base for the building. Although the covered shed, which I assume is some sort of canopy over a dump pit, was on the right side of the gable end of the building, there was no way to fit it there with the track in place so I shifted the shed to the left side of the building. 

Although the pictures show the sections of the building loosely fit together, I plan to secure them to the Gatorboard base once they're painted and detailed. 
After I took these pictures I airbrushed the building with a base coat of Vallejo Pale Blue Gray.

Southern New England Railway Maps

A few years ago at one of the CVRHS conventions (in Palmer, if I recall correctly) Jim Murphy displayed a series of original, color Southern New England plat maps. Jim (and another volunteer) were kind enough to hold them up and let me photograph the series of maps. I had them on my old computer back up hard drive and ran across them a couple of weeks ago. Thought it would fun to share them here. 
These are one of the few sets of originals we know about - and are more than 100 years old. 
Obviously there's some overlap between the photos of the maps - these things were big! 

Wordless Wednesday #126

Work Session Report - April 9, 2016

Very productive work session last Saturday. Stic came over and we got an early start (and actually got right to work...). 
Honestly, I've been dragging a bit on the layout over the last few weeks. I have been busy though. I've gone through numerous boxes of stuff and gotten rid of everything from old household papers (the shredder got such a workout it literally started smoking!), various pieces of wood, old VHS tapes, magazines, and even some half-started projects that will now never see the light of day. Sometimes you need to completely clean house.  
Anyway, if it seems like I haven't been blogging about layout progress lately that's the reason. Entirely necessary but hardly interesting enough to blog about! 
Back to Saturday. First of all, I appreciate Stic coming by, if for no other reason than it helped get me rolling again. Besides, Beauregard and Molly like him....
Plan for the day was to finish some benchwork alterations that involve adding a turntable and small engine house to what had been the town of Randolph and will now be a town based (in spirit, if not details!) on Montpelier Junction. Montpelier Junction didn't have a turntable at the time I'm modeling. I don't have room for a wye but I do have a nicely completed Diamond Scale turntable. The turntable came off my SNE #1 layout (see MRP 2000) and is still sitting in the piece of 3?4" plywood sub roadbed for that layout. The turntable "unit" is about 18" square and almost 12" deep (to accommodate the New York Railway Supply drive unit) so 
fitting it in place required some benchwork alterations beyond simply cutting out a circle. In classic Tom Sawyer fashion I convinced Stic into doing all the kneeling, bending etc... (see photo below) under and between the benchwork joists. 

Q: Do I feel guilty about this? 
A: No, I don't feel guilty about it. 
Not even a little bit. 

By the end of the day we'd gotten the turntable planted in the layout and had worked out the track and structure arrangement that seems to work best. Can't wait to get the track laid in this area and finally get some scenery down.