The Spike Extruder

Even a small layout like Pembroke has surprising number of ties, and each of those ties takes one to four spikes. That leads to an alarming number of spikes. Allow me to demonstrate with a little mental arithmetic. Pembroke is about 16 feet long, but most of it is two tracks wide. So it’s really […]

Preparing Cattails

The stream that bisects the pasture gets sluggish and swampy before it passes under the tracks and continues down the ditch to tumble (somehow!) into the Muskrat River. The swamp will consist primarily of cattails or bulrushes – they’re too similar to tell the difference in HO scale. I’d already planted a number of them […]