Axle Jig

Percy helped me determine that a keyed connection between axle and wheel works best for me. I don’t have a milling machine, and so a jig is the only way to make the slots in the axles reasonably precise. My thoughtful wife bought me a four-jaw chuck for the lathe for my birthday, and it […]

Driver tyres for 1120

Between family trips, sunshine and business I’ve struggled to get much going on the railroad for at least a month. However, a pleasant evening with the lathe has produced five quite precise rings. These will be the tyres for 1120, which will be the new name for Next Victim. Progress promises to be slow due […]

Art, Canada and 1905

I’ve just returned from a family vacation to Montreal, in which I was resoundingly and unsurprisingly outvoted in my application to get to the Canadian Railway Museum in St Constant. Fortunately, The Girl suggested we Hop-Off the Hop-On Hop-Off Tour for a visit to the excellent Musée des Beaux Arts. I had no idea Montreal […]

Pasture Mockup

I sacrificed some brown paper bags, hot glue and an evening to see how the 3-dimensional elements of the pasture are going to work. Those brown paper bags were well-spent. The scene captures the spaciousness of rural Ontario delightfully. However, the real learning from the evening was around the edges: how should this scene relate […]

Mock backdrop enlivens the pasture

There is nothing quite like a coloured backdrop to bring a scene to life, even if it is tossed together in a hurry. I taped together a few pieces of Bristol board The Girl had left over from one of her projects. Then using a grid to keep proportions somewhat accurate, I quickly sketched the […]

Deep seeing the pasture

Despite finding a good pasture last summer, I remain drawn to an even nicer one that Barbara White shared on Flickr, and which I wrote about earlier last year. There is nothing quite like trying to reproduce something to make you look at it deeply, and as I’ve done only enough scenery modelling to know […]

Amuse bouche of operations

My sister and her family came to visit this week. Between sandcastling, fireworks and eating together, we found time to check out the progress on Pembroke. Now, when you have a rabid foamer like me in your family, you’re likely to find a more productive way to spend your energy than building trains too. However, […]

Running Around

I’ve not seen one in ages, but model railroad magazines used to publish switching puzzles. They would present a situation where a train arrived on a scene and had to deliver some cars and pick up others. The game was to complete the job in as few moves as possible. Over the years, these switching […]

Bring in the next victim

Despite my success with Percy, I still don’t feel ready to tackle 622 and 10 again. So, I procured a Bachmann Spectrum “modern” 4-4-0. I’d always wondered what made this a “modern” engine, and it wasn’t until I was checking if it fit on Pembroke’s turntable that I noticed. Almost all eight-wheelers kept their fireboxes […]

Daily except Sunday

There were no trains on the Pembroke branch on Sundays. According to the schedule, even the first class to Ottawa ran daily except on Sundays, and freight trains were outlawed by the Lord’s Day Act, of course. So, on Sundays the branch slumbered. Starting on August 1st, 1905 and running one or two trains almost […]