AI and Model Railroading

When, after two years of social distancing, the Railway Modellers’ Meet met in person in 2022, all the clinics were online. That meant that the in-person part was only one day long, and consisted of on-the-spot content. We stole the idea of Birds of a Feather from technical unconferences, and have kept a slot like […]

Good Fences Make Good Neighbours on Pembroke

…There where it is we do not need the wall:He is all pine and I am apple orchard.My apple trees will never get acrossAnd eat the cones under his pines, I tell him.He only says, ‘Good fences make good neighbors.’… Mending Wall, by Robert Frost Behind the engine shed on Pembroke, the fence separates track […]

Pembroke Hay Field No Good for Tea

The area inside the corner at the south end of the layout was originally conceived as “the place to put your tea.” The idea was unpopular with the real model railroaders out there who universally proclaimed food and beverages should not be on the layout. Nobody would listen to my protests that “the place to […]

Locating Pembroke’s Boundary Fence

The next piece of scenery on Pembroke will fill in around the water tower, and will include the boundary fence that will keep the hay field from wandering onto the tracks. But where should the fence be relative to the structures on the layout? The Internet is no help at all, stating a broad range […]

Cattails Planted

The cattails are now installed, turning the small pond between the pasture and the cattle spur into a marsh. I left a couple of feet near the culvert free of weeds, as I reckon the section man would have dug up that area to keep the culvert free. The pond is about 40 scale feet […]

Preparing Cattails

The stream that bisects the pasture gets sluggish and swampy before it passes under the tracks and continues down the ditch to tumble (somehow!) into the Muskrat River. The swamp will consist primarily of cattails or bulrushes – they’re too similar to tell the difference in HO scale. I’d already planted a number of them […]

Cattle Spur Culvert

When I initially routed out the stream on the cattle spur module, I felt the roadbed was too low to allow for a culvert, and so, I chewed straight through the roadbed to make a space for a bridge. The rails flew over this chasm for months as I waffled on the bridge or culvert […]

Ontario Meadows and Fields

The land around Pembroke was settled about sixty years prior to 1905, and before that, it would have been forest. So a cleared area would not have been allowed to go fallow unless it were unproductive. Meadows are a recent addition to the Ontario landscape. Having said that, there is space in front of the […]

The Changing Landscape of Ontario

The Girl and I are travelling around Ontario this week, looking at universities. On the long drive from Ottawa to Fake London, there was ample time to ponder how the landscape has changed, even over my lifetime, and the implications to modelling Pembroke in 1905. The most alarming change has occurred in the past ten […]

Massing the Thicket

Whilst in Ontario a couple of weeks ago, I kept my eyes open for inspiration for a screen for the edge of the pasture background. My requirements were simple: trees in the 30-foot range that loosely formed a triangle. I didn’t have to search long. For twenty years my brother has been surreptitiously caring for […]