It didn’t bother me that much until I got old
2 Likes
It does look like drought scenery. And droughts certainly can happen.
2 Likes
Like your railroad and images. The last one looks like a painting? Regards, Peter
3 Likes
No, it’s just doctored settings in the iPhone camera, mostly brightening it up, the picture was pretty dark originally
4 Likes
Gives it the look of hot summer day! 
3 Likes
Imagine being a fireman on a hand-fired coal burner on the Gulf Coast. That would be east of the Mississippi river. Almost everything west of the river use oil fired steam engines.
3 Likes
When I first started out as a kid back in the early 90s I was using lichen because that’s what Toys R Us had. Over time I discovered I like the Woodland Scenics clump foliage and leftover material from their ready-made trees for bushes and hedges more. Once I get to the grass, shrubs, and trees stage on the layout I’m building nowadays that’s what I’m going to use this time too.
3 Likes
I totally agree. The only thing is that I’ve already bought enough lichen to completely forest Rod Stewart’s layout. I really ought to use up that paid for stuff first.
4 Likes
1 Like
The spot class no. 86 is completing its first round trip over the railroad. It’s turned out to be very picky and derailing at half the switches, always the first tender truck on the engineer side when backing up. But I finally discovered that the problem wasn’t the track, but it was a stiff wire leading to the truck. I was afraid to fool with it since it could disable the engine, but I found out that a little piece of styrene right before the switch point on the inside of the face of the rail would keep the wheel off of the point, And. Magic, it stays on the track with that application.
7 Likes
Elegant solution!
1 Like
The brass consolidation has absolutely no sideways play with the drivers and the rods are very tight. By comparison, the Bachmann consolidation is a contortionist with remarkable sideways driver play in a fairly loose running gear assembly, that’s how it can get around ridiculous train set curves.
Small improvements make a big difference.
Here is a Roundhouse caboose, with the only improvement at this point being new end ladders that look better with the handrail hoops extending above the roof line. It was designed to be a truss rodded caboose, but I left them off since the Rock Island cars had steel under frames.
But it still looked very empty underneath, too much air showing. Not wanting to spend a lot of time completely detailing an underbody, I painted a couple of pieces of stripwood black and approximated a steel underframe, good enough for general viewing from the side.
Much better! Even though the Rock Island cars didn’t have them, I thought about adding wire cupola braces, just because they look so good and ramp up the detail even more. This car is only marginally prototypical to begin with, such a deviation really wouldn’t matter much.
Cupola braces like on this car:
5 Likes
Wow Patrick you do nice work. Your layout is Amazing.
1 Like
Thank you. My layout is not very big and has been photographed elsewhere on this forum. It might look finished, but my photographs are very selective of location and there’s a few areas not completed. And one thing I’ve never built is a small engine terminal, but one day I hope I can get done, but at my age I don’t have that many years left to do much of anything.
1 Like