A start on fascia

Andrew and I made good start on getting the finish fascia onto Pembroke this Wednesday. I had one eight-foot length of 50-year old masonite from the original basement, and this consumed almost all of it! Rather than attempt to counter-sink and fill the screws, we elected to use button-head screws and pretend they’re all part of […]

Getting the Turntable Ends Right

I want to solder the ends of the turntable rails so they line up nicely with the shore tracks and stay that way. At the same time, I don’t especially want to use a PC board tie at the end of the turntable because I would like the first tie to look like wood. Not […]

The Pit Wall

One of the benefits of modelling a long-gone, poorly documented prototype is that occasionally you get to choose. Maybe you could call it a “benefit.” I’m not so sure, it tends to send me into a whirlpool of research, trying to find typical practices to inform my decision. So it was today when I started […]

Turntable Thoughts

Dodging through traffic on my ride home is perhaps not the best time to be thinking about how to make the Pembroke turntable work. Indeed, usually when I’m riding my bike I can’t think about much of anything. Yet tonight I had quite a good flow of ideas. Thanks to Mayor Gregor Robertson and all […]

More Roundhouse Drafting

As I was finishing up yesterday, I realized that the roundhouse needed to come closer to the turntable a little bit so as to avoid sharp points at the pit edge. A quick review of Engine Houses & Turntables on Canadian Railways, 1850-1950 by Edward Forbes Bush (thanks for the loan, Scott), shows that a […]

Concepts for Pembroke Roundhouse

It’s really inconvenient to run all the way down to Golden Lake, the other end of staging (12 feet away) to turn the engine, and so, I’m starting to turn my attention to the Pembroke turntable. One of the first things I need to figure out is the spacing of tracks for the roundhouse, and that […]

Canada Atlantic Way-Bills

Actual paper from the Canada Atlantic is about as rare as hen’s teeth. I don’t collect it, but I do keep an eye on eBay lest some show up, and if nobody else looks like they are buying it, I’ll bid on it to ensure it doesn’t get thrown out. However, I don’t have a […]

More Lessons from Brio

The kids were restless this morning after painting our faces, and so we decided to build a Brio layout and play trains some more. This gave me a chance to try out some of the ideas I’ve been working through since the last session. In particular, I tried out some ideas with different states for […]

Staging Yard Operational

We got home from our impromptu trip last night, and tonight I finally hooked up the staging yard bus wires. I also installed the hex frog juicer, which is pure magic. The daily mixed was sitting on one of the tracks waiting to come in and turn around. So, I uncoupled the engine and ran […]

More Playing with Brio

As I mentioned, I am using an enforced break from construction to think about car forwarding. My leaning has been toward something similar to what Tony Thompson has described with car pockets and realistic-looking waybills, and I have Mike White’s collection of Tony’s blog postings on my must-read pile. Probably, Tony is way ahead of […]