A lathe joins the workshop

I’ve wanted a lathe for about as long as I’ve been able to spell the word. Even before I got into Proto:87, I knew one would be a part of my workshop someday. Since getting into the finer scale, it’s been inevitable. My friend, Andrew Hutchinson, has more machine tools than a single person should […]

Construction Articles

While my mum’s here, and the railroad room is temporarily given over to its guest room function, I’m working on a few articles for Model Railroad Hobbyist. My recent rant about the tedium of North American model railroad magazines is still fresh in my mind, and it’s making me wonder if I can steer clear […]

Roundhouse mullions

The window pattern for this roundhouse came from a drawing for the roundhouse at Barry’s Bay. Each of the three windows has six large sections, each of nine panes, making 172 panes in all. That’s a lot of careful cutting, but trivial for the Cricut! I don’t know why I’d been putting it off, but […]

No plans for expansion here!

My mum is coming to visit tomorrow, and that means that I’ve spent more than the usual proportion of time on finishing up household projects especially in the railroad room cum office cum guest room*. The cabinets along the back wall of the room were among those projects, and I’m rather pleased with how they’ve […]

Roundhouse retrospective

Are models ever really finished? Maybe some are, but mine seem to get just finished enough. That’s the roundhouse now: I could continue to fuss with it, but I think it’s time to move on. To tell the truth, I didn’t really intend to build a roundhouse! I’m supposed to be building 622, but I promised […]

The privilege of the active

I’m waiting at IKEA for yet more cabinets, this time for the laundry room, and as far as I can tell, unrelated to trains. I have a warm cinnamon bun and a coffee and the self-satisfied glow of being here early enough to have missed the crowds. On the other side of the hall, across […]

Roundhouse trim out of order

As I was posting the photos of the smoke jacks the other day, I noticed that I had not yet completed the trim on the corners. Shucks! I had left this off until the front wall was done, and then I left it off until the rafters had stabilized the purlins, and then I got […]

Smoke jacks installed

The camera is a cruel critic! These smoke jacks look pretty good in real life, but when you get them under a macro lens, the deficiencies sure leap out. To be fair to myself, I think the camera was tilted in the photo above, and the two smoke jacks are actually quite vertical. To get […]

Gravel stop for the roundhouse roof

You’ve gotta love the Internet. My inclination when designing the edge of the roof was that there must have been some sort of parapet to keep the gravel on. However, if that was the case, the parapet must have been awfully low, or I completely fouled up the depth of the rafters. Now, the rafter […]

Vollmer Mill

At the Halifax and South Shore Railway Museum last summer, The Boy stuck up his hand when the proprietor asked if there were any model railroaders in the group. Later, he intimated that he wasn’t so interested in the railway itself as in the buildings and scene around it. When we got home, he started […]