Happy Friday everyone! Once again some exceptional photos! Grampy, great B&W scene. It could pass for the real thing! Garry and Curt, always great stuff! Nice night shots Mike! Robby, I like the Port St Joe weathering job. You have that down to a science! Bear, nice cars! Tom and Mike, nice pics! Crandell, nice J1! Michael, that shop is great!
Ok, as you guys know, I have pretty much spoiled myself and the boys with locomotives, and It’s really hard to have a favorite. Well, when BLI decided to run a USRA light Pacific, I was only slightly excited about it, I’ve purchased a lot of pacifics over the years with poor results {that doesn’t include Pennsy K4’s]. Even my brass locos don’t measure up to most other locos on the layout. On Thursday my first BLI pacific arrived, and to my amazement, it runs absolutely perfect! Finally after some 30 years I have the B&O passenger train I always wanted to model. Here are a couple of photos:
I probably should have vacumed the cobwebs out of the bridgework! Yes, that’s a scratchbuilt HO stepbox. It was a nightmare to make!
Last week I started rebuilding the Greenvale industrial area on my layout; I have stared a description of what is going on and my planning http://cs.trains.com/mrr/f/88/t/213739.aspx
Well, after a longer-than-I-wanted holiday hiatus, I’m back to modeling. And what better way to start the year than with a nice little caboose project. It started out as this
A while ago I got a plan for a booster box that someone made for use at Free-mo set-ups. The idea was to put a booster in a tool box that had all the connections that were required on the outside. I took this idea and modified it slightly to house my command station. Since I move every few years I figure having something like this to store my digitrax system would be great.
We use 1/4" clear pine roadbed that we mill, whether it is handlaid or Walther’s/ Shinahara code 83.
Starts like this http://www.ssmrc.org/newconstruction.aspx Works quite great for us, allows to spike flextrack or to glue/ hand lay ties. We also mill the wider “plates” for turnouts.
Just FYI, the Ertl construction line is 1:50 scale. So it’s a little large for HO. But then it is construction equipment, so you would expect it to be large.
I like your night shots, I have done a few of my own in the past. It really helps hide the lack of a proper backgound.
The #35249 is one of the Collect n Play series. The scale of these is all over the place from what I saw at the store and in the catalog. The Deere Dumper is on page 26:
The model is right at 35’ in HO. The length of the smaller articulated dump trucks (ADT) Deere makes, the 250D and 300D, is about 32’ and the bigger (370E and up) are 35’. The model resembles the smaller version a little better and the driver’s door scales just shy of 6’ so you can take your pick of which it represents.