Modelling Maine Railroads

A few days ago, I made a sketch of how I want my Penobscot Street Spur layout to fit into the corner of a room that I have planned for it to go in. I also sketched out some of the planned scenic elements of the layout, as well as the buildings that I have planned for the layout. The longer section of the layout will be built on top of shelving, and will have an additional shelf built above it. The shelf above will have lighting for the layout attached to the bottom of it, and will also serve to hold the scratchbuilt structures that I have that do not fit on this layout. I am planning on building the benchwork as 'floating' benchwork, as described by Lance Mindheim in a recent issue of Model Railroader. This should result in the layout looking cleaner and more presentable, a good thing as it will be located in a corner of a room. I also sketched in the approximate sizes and rooflines of the structures that I am planning to include on this layout. The scribbled vertica...

A few days ago, I made a mock up of my planned Penobscot Street Spur layout to test how the vertical elememts of the track plan, such as the buildings and hills, would look. I made the mockup from a scrap of cardboard and some masking tape. The masking tape on the mockup represents roads, while the small pieces of cardboard represent buildings. While it's not very pretty or well done, I think that the mockup helps show that the buildings and the hill covering the enterance to staging work together on the layout. From the mockup, I think that the number of buildings I designed into the layout are enough to give the impression that the layoit depicts an active industrial area, while still giving the layout space to breeth, so to speak. At the moment, this is about all the active model railroading that I can do, since my workbench is currently packed away. I'm hoping, though, that I can return to building things soon, but until then, not much will be happening on this blo...

Here is the track plan that I designed for the Penobscot St. spur. Click on the image to make it larger The layout is in HO, with 22 inch minimum radius and no. 4 turmouts, for now. Shaded in areas are roads. On the trackplan, Maine Central's Calais/Bucksport branch runs across the top of the plan, along the three foot six inch long wall. In the corner, the track will disappear into a clump of trees. In reality, the track there would go onto a large bridge to cross the Penobscot River into Bangor. After the track comes out of the clump of trees, the line crosses a street and then goes into a short cut. The switch to the Penobscot Street Spur is located in the cut. The Calais branch than passes under a road overpass, which is located in the upper right of the plan. The overpass actually does exist in real life, and is the perfect way to disguise the fact that the layout pretty much ends after the track passes beneath the bridge. I am planning to have a removable staging t...

For reasons beyond my control, I no longer have the space to work on a medium sized layout like I had planned. Thus, my layout building efforts will probably be contained to a corner of my bedroom. I have decided, then to design and build a small switching layout. Besides the space issues, I decided to work on a switching layout so that I would have a better chance of finishing a layout. None of my previous layouts have progressed passed the stage of tracklaying. I think that perhaps a smaller switching layout will make it so that I can finally get scenery finished. I also want to be able to try things like attaching a backdrop to my layout.  So I got out my copy of Maine Central in Color Volume 3, and started to look for a suitable prototype to model on a small switching layout. I had three criteria for a prototype for the layout: first, it had to be of the Maine Central in the 50s, second, it had to be in Maine (meaning no mountain division), and it had to be small enough ...

Over the past few nights, My layout has changed quite a bit. It now depicts the Maine Central Railroad in Norridgewock, Maine. I will explain this in a later post, probably over the weekend. For now, I will just dhare some poctures of the first HW-2 (Bingham to Waterville local freight) through my version of Norridgewock. HW-2 approaches heads through the limited trackage at Norridgewock. Looking at HW-2 from the driveway of a house near the tracks.   HW-2 heads through Norridgewock. An overview of Norridgewock with HW-2 running through it. HW-2 in Norridgewock. A view of HW-2 from a house near the tracks. HW-2 departs Norridgewock and heads south to Waterville.

This afternoon, I assembled Maine Central #3852, an accurail two bay hopper kit that I purchased at Mainline Hobby Supply in Blue Ridge Summit, Pennsylvannia. This is a very nice kit and built into a very nice car. It was a nice, quick, afternoon project after a long, slow, day at school. For the most part, I followed the instructions to the kit and did not make any modifications to the car. However, in the course of assembling the kit, I made several changes to the order in which I assembled the kit. I will note those modifications here, mostly for my own regrence if I ever build another model from this specific kit. First, when adding the coupler and coupler pockets to the car, add them before  adding the air resevoir. It makes screwing the couplers into place much easier. Second, glue the support post to the main body before adding the end assemblies with the couplers and such. Finally, screw the screws for the trucks all the way down the holes in the bolsters before att...

After posting my recent post on the Mattawamkeag freight house, I realized that I had 49 posts on this blog. So I thought I would write a special post for the fiftieth post on the blog to describe some of what has been done recntly, as well as what I am planning to work on next. My recent projects have included building the Mattawamkeag freight house, as well as expanding and tweaking my freight car fleet. I have posted about both topics fairly extensively. I also recently built basic scenery on the countryside straight module on my layout. While I will do a post specifically about that soon, I thought that I would share a few views of the basic scenery here. Obviously, it's very basic and does not look much like Maine at the moment as there are no trees. However, I am pleased with how it is coming so far. This is a low level shot that I took that I think turned out pretty well. It's noce to have some semi finished scenery on the layout, both to look at and to t...

I took a few more pictures of my Mattawamkeag freight house this afternoon. I thought that I should show it with a freight car so as to give a better idea of what size the building is. This gives a general view of the freight house with a boxcar spotted at the door. Another view of the track side of the freight house qith a boxcar spotted at the door. Looking down from roughly where the Mattawamkeag station platform would be located. I'm sorry for the poor quality of the photo- the lighting conditions that I took the photograph in were less than ideal.

Over Labor Day, I worked on scratchbuilding a model of the Maine Central Railroad's freight house in Mattawamkeag, Maine. Mattawamkeag is a remote rural town on the confluence of the Penobscot and Mattawamkeag rivers, and, more importantly, the junction of the main lines of the Maine Central Railroad and the Canadian Pacific Railroad. There was not much structure wise in Mattaeamkeag, and this freight house was one of the main railroad related structures in town. Since my next layout will depict Mattawamkeag, I thought that building the freight house would be a good project. The actual construction of the freight house is not that special. I used Northeastern Scale Models clapboard wood sheet for the walls, and scale lumber for the trim. I braced the structure with some peoces of styrene strip. The doors and windows are all from Tichy Train Group. Everything was glued together with a good amount of superglue. The building was supported by small woodwn stilts, instead of a regul...

I thought it might be interesting to post a picture of my workbench to show what projects I am currently working on. So here it is. As you can see, I have a large group of freight cars, all of which are Accurail kits. Two of the gondolas have been recently built, and a thord dondola is on mu workbench for purposes of photography. One boxcar is on the workbench for measuring purposes, while the composite boxcar is on the workbench for repairs. I don't quite know why the hopper is on the workbench. The two woood walls in front are my current project, a model of the Maine Central Railroad freight house at Mattawamkeag, Maine. I will post more about that project soon.

I took this picture of the two Maine Central gondolas that I recently built, along with a third Maine Central gondola that I had built much earlier. The third gondola was kitbashed following a prototype photo of a Maine Central gondola modified for limestone shipment to paper mills.

This evening a built another Accurail Maine Central gondola kit. This kit went together well and produced a nice looking model. Fortunately, this car came numbered differently from the gondola that I just built. I believe that they were two parts of a three car set. I purchased this kit at Maine Modelworks in Falmouth, Maine, just like the other one. This car still needs to be weathered at some point. A side view of the completed car. Roughly an end view of the car, showing the hand brake end. A three-quarters view of the car.

I took out my Maine Central Snowplow this morning and photographed it on the layout. The snowplow is a Walthers Proto model that I got at Maine Modelworks in Falmouth, Maine, last year. The snowplow is an excellently detailed model and it also operates very well. The snowplow sitting on the layout. I edited the first photo to try to make the image more realistic.

This is an Accurail kit that I had on my workbench for a few months. I finally built it today since I was looking for a small project. The car still has to be weathered at some point.

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.

I stopped at the Machais Station in September 2015 during a trip through Washinngton County and took some pictures of the station as it looked then. It has been preserved in some function (I'm not quite sure what), and is still in fairly good shape. The colors are not the original colors, as it was painted solid light gray in the 1960s and was probably standard Maine Central station colors of light gray and and dark green in the 1950s. The track side of the Station, with the agent's bay window. An overall view of the track side of the station. The end of the station facing the Machais River. An old Maine Central boxcar is preserved behind the station. The street side of the station