Modelling Maine Railroads

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...

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...