Water Tower Tank

Now we get to the meat of the matter: the tank is usually considered the hardest part about building a water tower. In my case, the hard work was mostly done in OnShape. The prototype tank in Wakefield has two different types of band connectors, and they are in different orientations. I copied these differences […]

Spout Installation

It took two attempts – the first with epoxy, and the second with CA – to get the spout and frame mounted on the base. The epoxy didn’t work out because even with help from my darling wife, I wasn’t able to clamp it where I wanted it. With CA, I could hold it by […]

Water Tower Roof

It took four or five hours of shaping Monashee Laser Engineering shingles into trapezoids, peeling tiny scraps of backing, and sticking the tiny trapezoidal pieces of paper in concentric circles, which I had, with a level of foresight for which I am still congratulating myself, inscribed in the 3D printed core of the roof, but […]

Register Refinements

It’s hard to believe that almost two years have passed since I introduced train registers at Golden Lake and Pembroke. In reality, there would be two registers at each station – one for each direction. However, in the interest of reducing the amount of stuff, I decided to make only one book that serves both […]

Ball Float

The water tower received a brass ball float and mast. The ball will indicate the water level in the tank, and I will animate it to lower when the valve is open and slowly return to the top of the mast when the valve is closed.

Water tower Spout frame v2

After the experiments a few weeks ago, I thought it was just a matter of attaching the water tower spout and its frame to the base and hooking it all up to the final model. Unfortunately, there is a surprising amount of complexity in the “attach the spout frame to the base” part of the […]

Pembroke Snacks

Pembroke is set in 1905, and so that number tends to leap out at me whenever I see it. These cookies, introduced by Leclerc sometime before Christmas, caught my eye, and I finally bought a box this week. I wonder what kind of research Leclerc did before slapping the 1905 label on them? I imagine […]

Water tower base gets sheathed

The weather was perfect this weekend for model railroading. Which is to say it was dismal for almost anything else. So, after a quick trip to Intercity Trains and Hobbies in the Far East, where I saw many old friends, I sat down with a clutch of sticks, a few tiny scraps of plastic and […]

Fresh Tracks at Donald

I was delighted to receive an invitation last week for the inaugural operating session on Brian Rudko’s latest layout, Donald. This is his first return to HO scale in decades, and the first layout he’s built for operations. It is inspired by Ian Wilson’s many books about the CN in southern Ontario, and Brian, with […]

Breaking the Water Tower

The water tower will be a nuisance to fix if it ever breaks, and so, I decided to find out when that will be. While The Boy is off at university, he doesn’t mind if I raid his Lego supply for some experimental apparatus, and I soon found the battery pack and motor I was […]