Roundhouse doors drafted

Tonight I drew up the roundhouse doors, which have a pleasingly interesting pattern of cross-bracing. Some panels have an X, and others have a Z. The braces match a Mattingly photo, taken in the 50’s, but the reasons why these shapes were chosen are lost in time. My friend, Mike Chandler, who worked at servicing locomotives, conjectures that […]

More on driving doors

A couple of weeks ago, when introducing my clinic on the Cricut, my friend Mark Dance claimed that if there is a more complicated way to do something, I will surely attempt to do it. Apparently he knows me pretty well. I don’t know if that is altogether my choice, but the philosophy behind Pembroke […]

Roundhouse front wall

Progress on the railway always takes a bit of a dive in November as I focus on Christmas gifts. In stolen minutes since the Railway Modellers’ Meet, two weeks ago, I’ve managed to add the missing blocking and timbers to the front wall of the roundhouse. The pillars for roundhouse doors are generally very heavy, […]

Roundhouse arches

Information is a curse and a blessing. On the one hand, having real prototype information makes our models that much richer. On the other hand, once you have it, it cannot be ignored. In my case, Peter Newman shared a Del Rosamond photograph of the roundhouse after it had burned (unfortunately I don’t have permission to […]

Roundhouse studs

Today The Girl helped me cut the studs for the roundhouse walls. We used HO scale 4×6 – a little heavy, perhaps, but I felt it was worth having some extra bracing to hold up the card. I had originally thought I would use the stud assemblies that I cut with the Cricut, but inspired by yesterday’s post, […]

Roundhouse Walls go Up

While working on the Railway Modellers’ Meet last night, I almost finished placing the remaining walls. That back wall is going to be tricky and quite delicate while the model is under construction! At the end of the evening, I was sitting back, admiring the progress when I noticed that one of the back wall […]

Erecting the roundhouse front wall

Putting the roundhouse together is a delicate operation. Not only is this not a square building, but also it needs to match the track configuration. So, it was with some trepidation that I approached erecting the front wall. I think along the way, I also changed my mind about how the roundhouse was going to […]

Roundhouse front wall

It appears that the front wall of the roundhouse was individual vertical board siding with about 6″ boards. So, I designed that up for lazy-guy individual boards on the Cricut and hacked it out of more Strathmore card. This time, I was slightly more careful not to paint adjacent boards with the same load from […]

A week of redos

It was a heavy week at work – most nights until past midnight. So, I didn’t get much done on the roundhouse. Even so, I managed to get a little bit done in the fifteen minute snatches between times. As I mentioned last week, the original shingle roof for the shed didn’t allow for any […]

Details on Cricut board and batten

Scribed and cut lines on the CricutA recent comment over on Model Railroad Hobbyist, where I cross-post some of this blog, made me realize that I didn’t do a great job of explaining the approach to board and batten. I actually thought it was simple and self-evident from the photos, but I guess it wasn’t. […]