Soft Pastels for a Fun Mockup

I’m a little exhausted by the whole turntable gear fiasco. So, I thought I would relax this evening by mocking up the roundhouse. I’m going to want a mockup to experiment with the doors, soon anyway, and I was originally thinking of only mocking up the front wall. However, I needed a break, and so, […]

More Thoughts on Roundhouse Doors

I’ve been pondering the roundhouse doors for a couple of days. Earlier this year, I came up with the idea to drive the doors with magnets beneath the layout. However, the tangle of rods and levers beneath the baseboard was hard to visualize. So today, I thought I would sketch it out. It still […]

Serendipity at Wakefield

I’m in Ontario attending some training right now, and had a little free time to pop up to Ottawa on the weekend to visit my mum. Being naturally adventurous and used to going on research field trips, she quickly agreed to join me for a trip to the end of the line at Wakefield QC […]

More Roundhouse Drafting

As I was finishing up yesterday, I realized that the roundhouse needed to come closer to the turntable a little bit so as to avoid sharp points at the pit edge. A quick review of Engine Houses & Turntables on Canadian Railways, 1850-1950 by Edward Forbes Bush (thanks for the loan, Scott), shows that a […]

Concepts for Pembroke Roundhouse

It’s really inconvenient to run all the way down to Golden Lake, the other end of staging (12 feet away) to turn the engine, and so, I’m starting to turn my attention to the Pembroke turntable. One of the first things I need to figure out is the spacing of tracks for the roundhouse, and that […]

What a difference a half-decade makes

The new sound decoder for #10 arrived last week, and I just took it out of the box. Wow, it is a lot smaller than the old decoder! This should be a cinch to fit into the tender, and may enable me to add a little more lead to bring the tender up to NMRA […]

Hard stuff!

When Al Feguson stopped by the other night, he was treated to a view of the locomotive without its tender tank (and associated weight), and with the cab roof off and a piece of tungsten sticking out. The extra weight really helps, but it’s not satisfying to have it sticking out like that. So, I […]

Running Repairs

One of the reasons you’ve not yet seen any videos of trains running on Pembroke is that I’ve been unhappy with the way the 4-4-0 was behaving (the other is that I find editing videos is way harder than typing a few words). It has sat in a box for several years awaiting rails to […]

Sketchup Photo Match

A couple of weeks ago, I picked up some foam core with an eye to starting to mock up the buildings for Pembroke. Unfortunately, there are no drawings to start from for any of the buildings. So, I thought I’d try out Photo Match on Sketchup to see if it could help. I was surprised […]

Engine house doors

Part of my vision is that an operating session starts with the engines shut in the engine house. The first thing the crews must do is open the doors and bring their engines out; and the last thing they do when retiring is to close the doors behind them. Now, I could just make the […]