Modelling Maine Railroads

In my last post of any substance, I wrote about my thoughts to rebuild my previous layout based on Norway Maine. While I still think that that is the most likely prototype for my next layout, even if that's only because I have a lack of other ideas. Grand Trunk New England lines seems like that it would be the best choice overall for a layout, but I'm still rather tempted to model the Bangor and Aroostook instead. On the whole, I'm rather disinclined to devote a large amount of time and resources, as well as a fair amount of space, to a layout idea that I'm not sure about. I did, after all, disassemble the Norway layout the first time, and at the time I decided to move on to something else, which makes me doubt that Norway is really the right prototype for my next layout. At any rate, nothing that I build will probably survive very long, as I tend to not get very far into building a layout before I disassemble it. With all these factors, it's rather hard to actually...

Longtime readers of this blog (are there any?) will know that I at one point had a layout based on the Grand Trunk New England Lines (GTNE) branch to Norway, Maine. This layout was built in modules but was disassembled when I moved in October. Recently, I've been thinking about layout design, and I've been trying to decide on a new layout to build. Yesterday, when I was looking through my phone at some of my older photos, I came across some photos of my layout based on Norway. Looking at them, I decided that I had a fairly good layout in that, so I've decided to revisit that layout and that prototype as a possible prototype for my next layout. You can find the original post on the track plan and layout design for my previous layout  here.  Or, you can access most posts on the topic of the GTNE by clicking on the Grand Trunk New England Lines category on the categories sidebar, though that may not get you to that particular post as it may have been posted before I added ca...

On Monday afternoon, I finished the potato house. There wasn't much work left to do on it after what I described in part 4 of this series, and it only took about two hours of work to finish off the potato house. I would have finished it Sunday evening, in fact, but the Patriots were playing in the Super Bowl, so that was more of a priority than model railroading for me. At any rate, all that was left to do was to paint the roof and weather the structure, and neither of those things took very long. The roof was simply painted with black acrylic paint, which covered fairly well, or at least well enough so that I did not have to add a second coat of paint. I then weathered the entire structure. I did not do anything elaborate on this building, as it should look like it was well maintained and the site of a fairly prosperous business, rather than a pile of rotting wood on the verge of collapse. Too often, I think you see structures that modelers have weathered to such an extent that it...

Progress on the potato house has been fairly slow over the last week, but I've been able to get a lot of work done on it this weekend. Since the last post on this subject, I have painted the walls, windows, doors, and concrete supports, glued on two different sets of roof panels, added details, and applied masking tape to the roof of the potato house in order to represent tar paper roofing. Most of this work was done over this most recent weekend, but the potato house was painted over the week. Quite a bit of progress, especially on painting, was made in fifteen to twenty minute intervals before dinner on weeknights. I managed to paint the entire structure in these short periods of time over the span of a week, painting one or two walls each night. The structure was painted light gray. According to the only prototype photo that I know of, at least part of the potato house was painted light gray. On the other part of the structure, the paint was worn off, so I assumed that the ent...