Arts and Crafts at OVAR

I’ve come to Ottawa to visit my mum and take her to a show. So, I reached out to my old friend, Bill Scobie, to see if I could get myself invited for an ops session (I can), and he reminded me that the Ottawa Valley Associated Railroaders would be meeting this evening. Well, I’ve […]

Painting Wheels and Assembling Trucks

With the perfect weather for model railroading this weekend, the coal car trucks have cleared the workbench. Some loco-building supplies have arrived, and I’m going to return to locomotive work for the next little while – except for a couple of weeks of travel that are coming up this month. With the success of the […]

Painting Trucks

Uncharacteristically for me, the scissor-like contraption I designed for holding and masking trucks worked on the first try. Being made from exactly the same 3D model as the trucks themselves, it was all-but guaranteed to fit. However, there are many questions of tolerance when it comes to the FDM printer. The key question was the […]

Coal Car Trucks Ready to Paint

After redesigning the trucks with inside brakes, I printed a test copy. It worked fine the first time, but I noticed the axles could be a little tighter in the bearings. This should assist with getting the ride height of the cars correct. A pair of .005″ shims inserted after the wheels seems to keep […]

An Unusual View

While working on a derailment at the Lee Manufacturing spur, I grabbed this photo to see what was going on with the alignment. There is no way to get your eyeballs in to see this view, but I must say, I really like the way this scene is coming together over the past two or […]

The Wrong Coal Cars?

Have I been drawing the wrong coal cars? This is a question that has been bothering me for some time. Basically, ever since I couldn’t get the side stakes to match the varying spacing on the lone photo I have of Canada Atlantic coal cars. This spacing could indicate the presence of slope sheets, meaning […]

Coal Car Brakes Revisited

“Oh Bother,” Said Pooh, as he examined once again the lone photo of Canada Atlantic coal cars. The photo is barely worth looking at, they’re so distant, but comparing to other cars nearby, Pooh was pretty sure they had brake beams slung from the truck transoms, rather than slung from the underframe outside the trucks. […]

Refining the Coal Car Trucks

When I visited Gary Hinshaw after Christmas, we were commiserating about our 3D printing woes. I’ve been feeling that my printing has gone downhill since I got new resin last year, and hearing that Gary felt the same, I decided to look into it. Well, it turns out that printer calibration is a thing, and […]

N-Possible Couplers

I got my first look at N-Possible couplers, a new scale-size N-scale coupler, at Tim Horton’s place just before Christmas. He had a pair of box cars on a test track, and I was immediately impressed by how well they coupled, and then easily uncoupled with a pick. While I could barely see them without […]

So Long mark

From my perspective, Mark Dance burst onto the Vancouver model railway scene fully-formed. There were no years of showing up at meets and sitting at the back of clinics, no decades of collecting whatever struck his fancy at train shows, no screeds explaining the superiority of his one-day layout. No, my introduction to Mark was […]