Toward Freight Operations

It sounds serious, but actually it makes me laugh: nothing moves on Pembroke without a reason. Every train that passes over the rails does so with authority, after signing the register, of course. And, I only airlift equipment onto or off the layout without running it to Golden Lake first if it breaks catastrophically. Until […]

Autumn in Ontario

I spent last week in Ontario, attending my brother’s wedding and visiting my family there. The colourful fall leaves were just starting when we arrived, but were near their peak at midweek when we took an excursion to Gatineau Park. With my new appreciation for trees, I spent a lot of time observing the fall […]

Thicket Installation

Thanks to some uncharacteristic planning on my part, the thicket was trivial to install: a hole at either end had been drilled and countersunk, and could still be found despite all the grass; the screws with which I’d tested the fit were still sitting on the layout. The backdrop was a conundrum until I remembered […]

All in the Family: the Thicket Backdrop

Behind the thicket, the sky currently comes all the way to the ground, or at least all the way to the strip of wood the supports the LED strip that washes the sky. Wanting the thicket to continue past the wall, I cast about for a more distant wood that I could paint onto the […]

Planting the Thicket

Somehow the 58 model trees that consumed my entire satellite workbench needed to condense onto a piece of plywood barely 30 cm long. Of course, there were holes for all of them, marked by little flags, now all but lost in the grass. The flags themselves had become grassy, thanks to the uncaring nature of […]

Thicket Twigs and Leaves

Nowadays, the cool kids are all using static grass to make the tiny lesser branches and twigs for their trees. As with my leather tie and Adidas bag, I tried to copy them, but the look fell flat. My static grass mostly missed the mark, and the few fibres that connected clung to the armature […]

Toward Pine Trees

The mighty White Pine is a kingpin of Ontario history. So I was chuffed to discover several scrawny ones amongst the Thicket. Being crowded by poplar and birch and some unidentifiable scraggly trees, most of them have branches on one side and several have branches only at their crowns. They would make poor Christmas trees, […]

Thicket Progress

Armatures for the thicket are complete for now. There were fewer discards than I anticipated, and so, I may need to demote some of the first row trees to the second row as I start planting if the thicket comes out too diaphanous. Once the armatures were formed and twisted into tree shapes, I coated […]

Homage

“Homage:” I think it’s one of Brian Rudko’s favourite words. For years, he’s been producing small shelf-top displays that consist of a model on a plinth with a backdrop that explains the model and why it’s important to him along with a photo or two, all artfully arranged, because that’s the kind of guy Brian […]

More Thicket Armatures

We’ve had a parade of visitors this summer, and as a result, the armatures for the thicket trees are nearing completion. After creating a number of trees with 26-gauge wire and strands of electrical chord, I went back to Michaels and found they also carry 32-gauge floral wire. This turned out to be just the […]