Filling Gaps

With my VanRail open house almost upon me, I’m racing to get a little more scenery presentable. Now, what to do about the gaps in the scenery caused by my preference for modular construction? The big gaps were easy to fill with some ground goop, but there are some smaller cracks that also need filling, […]

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 […]

The Herd are out to Pasture

I didn’t quite finish them ahead of the visit from the North Shore model railroaders on Wednesday evening. However now that the herd have been installed in the field, I’m delighted with the way they turned out. Thanks to Craig Townsend, I made six cows 7.5% smaller than the rest to form the more distant […]

Prototype Modelling for Cattle

It kind of started as a joke: why not model individual cows for my pasture? It didn’t take long to find a couple of dozen photos of Ayrshire cattle, but the prospect of reproducing them in HO scale would be ridiculous, wouldn’t it? I was laughing at myself for even thinking of this idea. Well, […]

Cattails Start to Sprout

To explain away the stream that heads straight into the ditch by the tracks, the area is going to get swampy. To produce these cattails, I borrowed a design idea from Noch, but cut my own, rather than plumping for their probably excellent product. Forty-seven plants in an area about 2.5x3cm looks about right. The […]

The Dairy Herd

Now that I can have as many cattle as I desire, the question becomes how many should I have? My cousin’s husband keeps about 100 cows producing milk, and at least another 100 heifers and pregnant or nearly pregnant animals, but he has machines that do most of the milking. Surely hand-milked herds in 1905 […]

Pasture Bushes

Most of the pasture consists of grass and weeds, but the stream is lined with bushes to such an extent that it often disappears. A couple of years ago, after reading Gordon Gravett’s books, I ordered a small square of rubberized horsehair from Treemendus. When it arrived, along with a small shank of postiche, I […]

Blending a Cow

A quick online search, and indeed a visit to the hobby shop, confirmed that populating my pasture with a herd of Ayrshire cattle is going to be a pricey proposition. Moreover, even if I were to spend $20 or more on a hand of cows, they will be in three different poses: grazing, mooing, and […]

Pasture gets first layer of grass

Well, there was no more procrastination to do. So, the pasture finally became green enough that it might actually feed some scale livestock, provided they don’t fuss too much over a belly full of tiny plastic filaments! The near side of the fence will receive deeper weeds, and so, it will be completed in the […]

Blending the background

If I’m honest with myself, I might be procrastinating. I do this whenever there’s a new skill to develop and apply and I’m nervous about getting started. However, I convinced myself that the background should be blended with the landscape before starting on static grass. The blending started with a small piece of blank backdrop, […]