Sprinting to not finish

The Railway Modellers’ Meet starts with Iain Rice’s keynote this Saturday, and I’m going to have to declare the flatcars ready for display if I hope to get the locomotive into the display as well. It’s been a bit of a push even to get them this far. Every evening I think I’m going to […]

Flat car decals

I spent a pleasant hour talking on the phone with my sister while sliding newly-arrived decals onto the flat cars this afternoon. One of the many nice aspects of the wooden car era is that the lettering was simple. With only five gaps between the six stake pockets, there is room for no more than […]

Bringing the flatcars back to earth

After no small amount of hemming and hawing, I decided to take a mulligan on the body bolsters for the three flat cars. There is no point in finishing a model that you’re not satisfied with. So, off came the too-high bolsters, and I get to make some fresh ones in the next day or […]

Lettering Test

The thing about working on lettering is that there’s not much to show until it’s done. You spend hours squinting at photos, trying to decide if a circle is an oval, or if that’s just the angle, and even more hours deciding if it should be a hair skinnier or taller. Extra opinions help, and […]

Sky high flat cars

The trouble with building a batch is that when you make a mistake, you replicate the mistake for each member of the batch. So, despite passing Saturday morning enjoyably melting tiny pieces of plastic strip into globs that look passably like body bolsters, I now have three flat cars that all sit approximately .030″ (.75mm) […]

Colour separations

My cousin John is a year or so older than I am, and as a kid, I kind of looked up to him. Back then, kids built models the way they play video games today, and on one visit, John showed me a plane he was working on. I was astonished to see that the […]

A sacrifice to the weather gods

No amount of YouTube videos or re-reading of Martyn Welch’s excellent book, The Art of Weathering, could convince me I was ready to dust off my rusty weathering skills. Moreover, the world has changed and I want to try my hand at some of the techniques that have taken the other model disciplines by storm. […]

Passenger car ideas

My first passenger car was 3D printed by accident. It started with the bullnose roof, which would have been difficult to craft. When I finally had the roof drawn, I started wondering how difficult it would be to draw the rest of the car, and then I wondered how much it would cost at Shapeways, […]

Modelling at Vancouver Train Expo

With fall well and truly under way, it must be time for BC’s biggest model train show. I spent most of Sunday at the “Craftsman’s Corner,” demonstrating that some of us still make models, despite the chequebook appearance of the hobby. This year, I had the opportunity to share the table with Mike Barone and […]

A summer well-spent

It has been quite a summer. Between three weeks in England and France subjecting the kids to an intense dose of European history and culture, a long weekend in New Brunswick attending family functions, and a week recovering at a cabin on the Sunshine Coast, there hasn’t been much time for railway pursuits. What little […]