Why Pembroke?

I suppose, given the recent conversation, I should come clean and explain why I am modelling Pembroke. My interest in the Canada Atlantic Railway started in my late teens. I was certainly influenced by Niall MacKay’s excellent book, “Over the Hills to Georgian Bay.” But, if I am honest, I was thinking at the time […]

Why do we do the things we do?

When Ron Keith sought me out at the train show in Burnaby in November 2012, the doctors were giving him until Christmas to live. Ron wanted to give me a plow that he had built from a photograph I had given him more than a decade before. A couple of weeks later, I was at […]

I’d Like to Call a Friend

Work on the staging yard stalled for a couple of weeks. I got all the points installed almost two weeks ago, and then crickets. Well, it wasn’t actually stalled so much as waiting. In this case, I was waiting because I wanted Andrew to come and install all the guard rails. Of course, I could […]

It’s not the hours, but the minutes

Yesterday was one of those days when the rest of my life took over and there wasn’t any time for the trains. Or was there? I had fifteen minutes from 7:30 to 7:45 while the Boy was playing on the iPad (he gets 15 minutes a day) and the Girl was watching him, and I […]

Elitist? Bring it on!

Mike Cougill has initiated another interesting conversation via his blog, this time responding to the allegation that he is elitist. He also points to the Model Railroad Hobbyist thread on the topic of elitism, which I started reading when it was a young thread, but lost interest a few days ago even before there were […]

Ambience

I’ve been on the lookout for an inexpensive stereo for the train room for some time now. Today was the lucky day! On the way home from an appointment, I stopped in at a garage sale and found a stereo. I figured they would be increasingly flexible on price as they came closer to closing, […]

Getting Finescale

My friend, Mark Dance, just sent me a link to the Pendon Museum website. It’s been updated since the last time I checked in, and might be worth a look if you’ve not seen it before. I was first introduced to Pendon more than twenty years ago, when I was in university. Leafing through the […]