A Young Helper

I worked from home today (it was our annual pretend earthquake), and so, we finished homework long before bed time. “Would you like to play on the iPad or come and help me do some soldering?” I asked the boy. “Hmmm…” (weighs the options carefully) “Help with soldering!” Actually, this is a posed picture. However, […]

Progress at end of September

It’s September 32nd, by my reckoning. So how am I doing against the Big Hairy Audacious Goal? One month in, and I think I’m about a week behind schedule. For those of you who are no better at math than I am at reading a calendar, that’s 25% behind schedule. At this rate, I’ll have […]

Ties and Ballast

As they say in another hobby, it’s time to fish or cut bait. So, this week I put away the test track and went for broke on the south module. I also happily discovered that October is still more than a week away, and I may still accomplish my goal for the month. I first […]

The Big Hairy Audacious Goal

My friend, Mark Dance, is someone I admire. He is an amazingly productive model railroader: in less than eight years, he took his quadruple deck Columbia and Western from paper to the cover of Railroad Model Craftsman, and a regular feature on the local operating scene. When I asked him at this weekend’s VanRail operating […]

The Engine House Lead

The Proto:87 Posse rode to my place last night in the form of a visit from Andrew. As I mentioned, I’m eager to get back to the layout now that I know what I’m doing with track construction. So, we cleared off the door that is still awaiting installation in the laundry room, and plunked […]

Ballast Tests

The Canada Atlantic was ballasted with gravel quarried from various pits along the line, as were most railways of that period. So, it should be a simple matter to simply dig up some dirt from the right of way or from one of the quarries, sift out the big chunks and glue it down. Unfortunately […]

Tie Colour

Now we come to one of those great challenges with modelling the turn of the century: colour. In particular, since we’ve been talking about track, what colour should the ties be? The ties on the Canada Atlantic were almost certainly untreated, as preservatives for ties were something of a research topic, and the CA enjoyed […]

Track Details

There is a reason why William Cornelius Van Horne paid thousands of navvies to lay the CPR: it is remarkably tedious work! I mean, really, four spikes for every tie! Is it really necessary? Tonight I shook the frets out of the Proto:87 Stores packaging and tried out some of their joint bars and spikes. […]

Test Switch

It’s become fashionable to call the throw bar of a switch by its proper name: switch rod. Now, I’m all for using the correct terminology, but it seems to me that calling the giant chunk of PC board that keeps model switch points the correct distance apart gives these abominations more credit than they deserve. […]

Test Turnout 2

We left off last week with the straight(ish) stock rail in place, congratulating ourselves on a good evening’s work, considering we started with bare plywood. This week, we got through most of the rest of the engineering, with the exception of the switch rods. I hope to get those and the remaining details done by […]