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, […]

North Section of Pembroke Stacked

How hard can it be? I’ve seen countless people stack layers of extruded polystyrene to rough in the contours of their layouts. Yeah, yeah, I figured out that the inside corners of the steps dictate the slope, not the edges that will get smoothed off. It looks easy! Well, to quote Michelangelo, “I am still […]

North Section Ballast – One Step Forward?

I didn’t quite get to the point where the Posse could start laying rail when they (in the form of Andrew, Julian being in transit, Jim being MIA and Chris being a thespian) descended upon my garage last night. Even so, we did have a productive evening of ballasting. The reason why I didn’t quite […]