Pasture smoothing

The rough pasture matured long enough beside its prototype photo to gain hash marks where material needed to be added or removed. So, with the weather increasingly bucolic and locomotive projects winding down for now, I mixed up a batch of Celluclay in the hopes of making the model look a little more like its […]

Updated Register Pages

After filling in the register every time a train traversed the line for almost a year, it was time to add some more pages. With all that experience came some improvements. First, I did away with the Tonnage column. In terms of model operations, it’s as useful as a spoon in a sword fight. Indeed, […]

716 Mary St

I needed an appropriate project for my Cricut demo at the Railway Modellers Meet last weekend. The three gable-end houses between the Pembroke Milling Company warehouse and the freight shed presented manageable opportunities and so I decided one of them would be the subject. None of these houses appears to have survived the 1912-13 engorgement […]

1120 Done for Now

After more months than I’d planned, 1120 has left the workbench and returned to Golden Lake to resume service to Pembroke. I decided to experiment with a dot filter on the boiler and tender, and it came out a little heavier than I would have liked. However, considering it is not on home rails, perhaps […]

Railway Modellers’ Meet is in the Bag

This weekend was the Railway Modellers’ Meet of BC, our annual divisional meet here in BC. As chair of the organizing committee, I had the opportunity to fill in for a cancellation in the clinic line-up, and supported the new recruiter for table-top clinics (soon to be renamed “demonstrations” I think) with a demo as […]

Coal loads for 1120 and 622

I had already started to put 1120 together again when I realized the coal bunker was still just sheets of lead. I’ve made this mistake before, and narrowly averted disaster when I discovered that #10’s tender was not water-tight and consequently wound up dribbling glue all over the electronics inside. So, this time I did […]

Cricut Print and Score and Cut Experiments

It’s time to conclude my Cricut printed car sides experiments. In the end, I’ve not been able to replicate the beaded siding that graced most Canada Atlantic house cars. However, the single-score method might be good enough to represent passenger car siding. In photographs, the freight car siding looks like alternating deep and shallow grooves. […]

1120’s Tender Rear

The pun was unavoidable. I originally left the lining off the rear of 1120’s tender because the information sheet with Black Cat’s decal set indicated I should. However, it didn’t sit right with me, and when that happens, I go looking for pictures. A photo of 1362 wrecked at Renfrew Junction in 1906 sealed the […]

Lettering for 1120

Thanks to everyone who wrote in to sound the alarm about leaving masking tape on too long! I’m thrilled that anyone reads this blog, and dumbfounded that so many of you care. In the end you needn’t have worried: the masking tape came off easily and the paint stayed on. I hadn’t particularly planned to […]

1120 Visits the Paint Shop

The new airbrush made quick work of spraying 1120 all black. Compared with the old airbrush, this one is a delight. Sure, I can still make mistakes, but I don’t feel like I’m constantly fighting the tool. This was my first time using Vallejo paint and primer. I can’t even write that name without Marc […]