Modelling Maine Railroads

Sorry that I haven't been posting much regularly, but I' ve been really busy with other, non-model railroading, things. In fact, I haven't even managed to post wordless wednesdays on time.  This evening, though, I was finally able to get some modeling done. This evening, I assembled and painted two switchstand kits. These switchstand kits are made by Osborn Scale Models, and are laser cut wood and wire. The kit was fairly easy to assemble. I won't give an extensive written account of this - rather, the pictures will tell the story. My workbench at the start of the evening, with all the kit parts laid out and ready for assembly to begin. The switchstand bases after having holes for the posts drilled. The base on the right was rendered unusable by a drilling error on my part. Bases, posts, and a few other small pieces assembled.  The entire switchstand assembled but not yet painted. The posts were provided much longer than neccesary, so I c...

Last evening, I added some terrain to the area around Norridgewock yard on my layout. I added a small rise in front of the tracks, following topographic maps of the area. To add the rise, I first attached some scraps of one inch thick foam insulation board that I had on hand. The foam was then attached with screws. I then cut the foam to eliminate the sharp corner in the center of the image and to make the foam parallel the track. I then shaped the foam with a rasp, shaping the foam to get a realistic variety of contuors I saved the foam shavings generated by shaping the foam. I put the shavings in a mall plastic container and then used the shavings to fill in the gaps between the sheets of foam that I used to make the rise. A view of the finished rise by the Maine Central Tracks in Norridgewock. I got more work on the rise done at the same time, and I will post more about that work soon.

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...

Here are a few pictures of a small scene that I started Yesterday. The building in the scene models a standard design section House on the Washington and Old Dominion. It is meant to go with my Dunn Loring station. The section house was scratch built in three nights with clapboard siding wood sheet. Scenery is a a layer of ground foam with static grass flock sprinkled over the ground foam, and the soaked with diluted white glue. The scenery is not yet finished. Looking towards the section house. I played around with the image color filters on my phone and converted the image to black and white. This is the so called vintage setting on my phone. I like how it looks personally, as it seems like a print from an old photo from the 1950s.