Cabinetry

For much of December, when I wasn’t over-eating, I was working on the cabinets that will go around Pembroke. They’re a long way from finished. Indeed, there will be six cabinets, and only two carcases are assembled so far. However, progress is happening and accelerating; hopefully I will get the first two cabinets installed tonight […]

North Section Wired

By gum, but it’s cold out there! The garage where Pembroke is under construction is not heated, except by a tiny little plug-in fan heater; it’s got about the same thermal capacity as my wife’s hair dryer, which is to say, it doesn’t make much of a dent in the -8 Celsius that we are […]

Eye-Fi – My New Camera Toy

Up until now, all the photos on this blog have been taken with my iPhone. It is a super-handy device, but I know you are surely as disappointed in the quality of the photos as I am. History shows that if it’s difficult for me to upload photos, I only do it a few times […]

North Section Track

The track on the North Section is finally complete. The elapsed time was longer than the south section, but that was due to real life getting in the way of the trains. Overall, I think the effort was less for this section than the first. Compared to the south section, I made a couple of […]

My first video – fixing a frog

Some things are harder to explain in words than to show. So, I thought I would try shooting a video instead. Let me first tip my hat to people like Greg Amer, who have produced instructional videos on modeling topics. Even with the minimal editing I did, the work involved is tremendous compared to a […]

Progress at end of October

Keeping the year-end BHAG in mind, I wanted to complete track-laying on the north section before the end of October. Saturday was October 33rd, and I made a last-ditch effort to get it done. When the dust settled around three in the morning, the clocks had retreated an hour (bonus!), and I had all the […]

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 […]

Switch Rods

I wrote before about my dislike of just about all the switch rods I’ve ever seen on model railways (including my own). The standard PC board has two things wrong with it. First, it usually doesn’t look much like the prototype, which is typically made of a flat steel bar a couple of inches wide […]

Finished Points on South Section

Just in case you begin to believe that energy on Pembroke has been diverted to Brio-Pembroke, I did actually finish installing the points on the south section of Proto:87-Pembroke last week. Each of the points needed only a little bit of judicious filing before it would sit perfectly against its stock rail and the test […]

First Operating Session

What, wait did I skip a few posts? Yesterday, my daughter was sick, and I had to stay home to look after her. She wanted to get out the Brio trains and have a good proper play, which is exactly what we did — for about four and a half hours! Now, ordinarily, I get […]