Burnstown Road Farm

For several years, one of my background tasks has been to look for inspiration for the scene beyond the roundhouse. I took a whole lot of pictures on our cross-Canada tour in 2018, but never found exactly what I was looking for, which is a pasture with a hill. These are important to tell the […]

Testing a new toy

My brother likes to get gifts that he would like to play with himself. So, when he learned that there is such a thing as static grass, well guess what I received for Christmas. I painted up a square of Styrofoam that has been lurking in a corner of the garage for half a decade […]

Inspiration for the spaces between

My recollection of August in Ontario is of a landscape weary of the summer’s heat and sun, but desperate to hold on rather than giving in to the autumn that is just around the corner. I remember the seed heads of ochre grass bobbing against my thighs as they launched grasshoppers whose wings flashed briefly […]

The Muskrat River gets safe for swimming

It seems like years ago that I went through the ordeal of smoothing out the Muskrat River. In fact it was only five months. After spending three weeks filling and sanding and priming and sanding and painting, it didn’t read like water. I wasn’t happy with it. Rick Sutton and Mark Dance suggested that I […]

A touch of paint

There is a truism in modelling that the surface is all anyone sees. So, in preparation for a visit from the North Shore Model Railroaders, I quickly dabbed some paint on all the blue foam insulation. The paint is Rona recycled “Clay,” which is a pretty close match for the gravel ballast. Suddenly the scenery stops […]

The Consistency of Oatmeal

After years of hearing about it, I decided to give Lou Sassi’s ground goop a try. I found a few online resources with the recipe, including a video on the Model Railroader site, with Lou himself mixing it up. The recipe I found was one part Cellulite one part fine vermiculite one part dirt-coloured paint […]

Pembroke’s River is Finished (for now)

I’ve declared the river to be finished from now. Does it look like a river? Well, from sufficiently low angles, it reflects mostly sky, and almost succeeds. However, the sky is not as bright as a real sky, and so, the river is not as bright as a real river. The kids both say it […]

Liquitex Spray on the Muskrat River

After five coats of paint or primer, filling and sanding in between, I finally felt ready to place the finish coats. These are all going to be sprayed in the hopes that I don’t have to sand between coats (time will tell). My darling wife looked at the river and declared that it was too […]

Pembroke Potato Fields

One of the benefits of modelling a prototype location is that you don’t have to make it up. Until David Estabrooks’s recent posting to Facebook, I was expecting that the land to the south of Alfred Street was bush. However, we can clearly see that there was a field of vegetables, and from the spacing, potatoes seem […]

Pembroke South Stacked

Pembroke starts to peter out as we move further south. By the time we get to Lee Manufacturing at the south extremity of the layout, houses have disappeared, to be replaced by potato fields and pastures. Aside from the factory and a cattle pen, the only structures belong to the roundhouse. The Mary Street bridge, […]