Modelling Maine Railroads

This morning I carved terrain in what will become a gravel lot by a row of potato houses at Presque Isle. I used a small, plain, kitchen knife to carve some slight variations into the land that is made of 1 inch thick foam board. In my opinion, this makes the layout much more realistic as ground, especially in Maine, is never flat. A view of the area before the terrain was carved. The area after the terrain was carved. The terrain slopes gently away from the tracks for drainage to the Aroostook River, as per prototype photos of the area.  After two days and full dehumidifier, my road finally dried, so I may attempt more scenery work soon. My two cats decided that they were both going to 'help' with layout work this morning. 

I added ruts to the road at Presque Isle this afternoon. I used a toothpick to move the gravel around to form ruts, as this is a gravel road in Maine during November and roads are very bad. I'll add weeds and grass to the road later, when I get some new scenery supplies. The road is still wet after more than a day, so I'm a bit worried about the road drying properly. The weather is very humid here, so I won't be able to do more scenery for a while. More on this road and the layout it's on later, once I'm back on a computer.

A view of the new road from above. The new road, as seen from the end of the layout. At road level. More on this later when I'm not typing on a phone.

Last night after I finished work on the causeway section I did some breif tracklaying (more about this in a later post), and then hooked the track up to apower suply to run a test train. I ran a plow extra made up of Maine Central plow no. 82 and Alco RS3 no.557. The plow extra is very appropriate for my layout as I model eastern Maine in late November, when snowstorms are fairly common. I took a video of the first test run, which I was going to post here, but blogspot wouldn't let me upload it so I will just post a picture. I may add the video later if I can get things to work. The layout did run well, especially at the slow speeds that were typical of the Calais branch.

Last night I started work on the Machais causeway. This causeway takes up about five actual feet of space on my layout and will eventually become one of the layout's signiture scenes. The causeway carries U.S. route 1 and the Calais branch across an inlet of the Machais River. It is a very recognizable location in real life even though the tracks have been removed and replaced by a trail. The track is very close to the road and probably is on a right of way that is only 15 feet wide or so between the road and the water. The road goes up a hill on both sides of the causeway, which made things more difficult to model. However, it is such a recognizable scene on the Calais branch that I had to model it. To model this feature, I first took a roughly 4 feet long by 6 inch wide piece of foam board to construct the part of the road that climbs up a hill. On my layout, I model part of the road leading towards Calais, and I had to find a way to make the road slope upwards. To do this, I a

Yesterday I finished up benchwork construction on the Machais part of the layout and worked on attaching a base layer of foam insulation board o the layout. Construction of the wood section of the benchwork took a few hours. The first part of this section of benchwork was a six foot long section that extends into the center of the room. This section will evevntually be part of a larger peninsula with a turnback curve at the end, but for now it is just part of a large loop that represents the mainline around Machais. I started this section of benchwork with a 6 foot long by 18 inch wide frame of 1x3s and 2x3s. Nothing unusual about the construction, and it went together easily. However, attaching the legs was complicated as this section had to be mounted an inch below the rest of the layout as it represents part of the Machais River. This should have been simple, except I forgot to get the legs cut down an inch. Because of this, I had to support the frame up on to chunks of scrap