Modelling Maine Railroads

More progress on the potato house this evening. I attached floors to the main part of the structure, cut and glued styrene strip to represent the large concrete blocks that supported the prototype structure, and primed all the styrene parts of the structure with cheap gray craft paint. The next step will be to paint the entire structure with good quality paint. The walls will be painted grey and the freight doors painted dark green based on prototype photos. Floors were made out of .020 inch styrene sheet to allow the concrete piers to be attached to the structure. The floors also provide additional stability for the structure. Half of the concrete blocks attached to the floors. The blocks are roughly two scale feet high by eight scale inches wide. They are placed roughly six to seven scale feet apart. The rest of the concrete blocks attached. All of the styrene surfaces on the building were painted with some cheap gray craft paint that I had on hand. I just...

I got new X-Acto knife blades this afternoon, so the potato house project can move on. This evening, I got quite a bit more work done on the potato house. I cut and attached freight doors to the side walls, attached corner trim, assembled the two sections of the potato house, and attached them together to create the curve of the structure. Overall, progress on the structure went quite quickly, expcept for the door that I attached in the wrong place. The potato house will hold to forty foot boxcars and refrigerator cars when completed. While it is a fairly small structure,  potato houses were often fairly small structures, and the dimensions of the model I am building reasonably match the dimensions of the prototype, as far as I can tell. The freight doors were cut from some v-groove styrene sheet. The doors are three by two centimeters, which works out to be roughly eight by five scale feet. The door runners (?) at the top are made of scale lumber that I cut from clapboard...

While I haven't been particularly active in terms of model railroading so far this month, mostly because I have been unable to settle on a plan and a particular prototype to model. Yesterday, however, I started working on scratchbuilding a model of a potato house. These structures were common through northern Maine, particularly in the county (Whenever I refer to the county, I am speaking of Aroostook County, in northern Maine. Aroostook County is commonly referred to as only "the county" in the part of Maine I am from). Potato houses were ubiquitous in towns located along the Bangor and Aroostook railroad in the county up throuh the 1970s, and I have been looking at building a small layout based on part of the Bangor and Aroostook. Thus, I need to have models of at least one, if not more, potato house for a Bangor and Aroostook layout to look credible. I decided to scratchbuild my model based on a prototype potato house located in Houlton, Maine. This potato house wa...

100 posts - that's quite a few posts. While about a fifth of these posts were wordless wednesdays, so they didn't require much in the way of effort or thought to write, I have put a good number of posts on this blog. While there isn't anything particularly significant about reaching this number of posts, there is a bit of a feeling of accomplishment about this blog. At the moment, the blog has around 6400 pageviews all time, and the most viewed post is the post for the trackplan I drew for Maine Central's Penobscot Street Spur (which perhaps says something about what I should be modeling, but I digress). Overall, I think that the blog has been quite successful, and O've gotten some very good ideas out of the comments that I would never have thought of otherwise. I took some time this evening to clean up the blog a bit, as the header was getting rather messy with mispellings, out of date information, and an old photo. I thought it was time to get the blog into...

Monon #15012 is an Accurail kit for a fifty foot outside braced boxcar that I built on friday. I purcahsed the car at M. B. Klein, a train store located north of Baltimore, on Monday. The car was an easy build and I think the the car turned out quite well. In my opinion, this type of car really helps set my layout in the 1970s as it is clearly a modern (at least, modern relative to my usual modeled era of the 1950s) boxcar. Considering that my layout is set on a rural branchline in Northern Maine, it seems reasonable to wonder why I would have a Monon boxcar on my layout. Mostly, this boxcar just caught my eye when I was at the train store and as it fits my era, I bought it. It also seems that it would be fairly possible to see a Monon boxcar occasionally in Northern Maine, as I think that the Monon served a fair amount of industry in its territory. I dont know that for a fact of course, as I do not know very much about the Monon. I do know, however, that Maine Central and CP Rail ...

CP Rail alco S2 #7020 takes a local through northern Maine in the late 1970s. A late running local freight enters a small town in Northern Maine. The local passes the old, beaten up, station. I photographed all these scenes on my new layout that depicts CP Rail in northern Maine. I took the photos with the room lights turned off and the flash on my phone on. I rather like the effect, despite the plain pink foam board everywhere. I will post about my new layout very soon.

A scene on my new layout. Happy (belated) New Year!