Modelling Maine Railroads

It's the mid 1970's in a downtown industrial area in a big Canadian city (most likely Toronto, but perhaps Hamilton, Vancouver, or Montreal), and a run-down CP Rail S2 pulls a single 50 foot boxcar to the last industry on the industrial spur. The car sways wildly over rundown track as it trundles past empty industrial buildings and across, and sometimes down, streets. The train barely even gets to five miles per hour. It's very clear that this branch does not have much time left to live. This is the sort of feel that I want for my next layout. While I haven't decided on a particular location, I am sure that I want a general theme of a run down industrial spur for my next layout. Most likely, I'll end up modeling the CPR Toronto terminals, or rather, some small section thereof. The most appealing part of the Toronto terminals, in my opinion, is the waterfront wharf areas around Queen's Quay. There is a good article about the area  here  (scroll to the bo...

I have not managed to post anything o the blog in the last month. To be honest, in  this time, I haven't interacted at all with the world of model railroading. I've let my subscriptions to Model Railroader and Railroad Model Craftsman lapse, and have not spent much time looking at model railroad blogs, at least compared to how much time I used to spend. I'll try to explain why this is. For the past eight months, I have not quite had an active layout project. I dismantled the Norway, Maine layout that I had built over the summer during last October, when I moved houses. While I have since written a fair amount on this blog, most of it has been largely inconclusive stuff about half-baked layout design ideas that have not lasted a week even as a working plan, much less gotten to something approaching layout construction. While I started something in November and again in January, they were in fact very bad ideas and I'm not quite sure why I started working on them, oth...