Weekend Photo Fun - Mar 27th to Mar 29th - 2020

Model Railroader General Discussion (Model Railroader)
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Good morning from cloudy, mild and rainy Northeast Ohio!

This is the weekly thread were modelers can show their completed projects, in progress projects or pictures of their layout.

Got a couple of cars done this week!

Another of my PC Projects, an ex-PRR X43C 1944 AAR Boxcar, done using a Red Caboose Kit, Painted with Floquil PC Green Paint and lettered with Mask Island Decals. Car was in general service with return to Collinwood Yards in Cleveland to service the many manufacturing plants in the Cleveland area.

Proto 2000 52’6" Greenville Gon kit, painted with Scalecoat II Black and lettered with Champ Decals. The NYC purchased thousands of these cars in the late 40’s and early 50’s to replace smaller gons that were built pre-WWII. They were in general service hauling various items of completed items like pipe and steel beams along with scrap loads going back to the steel mills.

A pair of Rivarossi PRR U25C’s with a coal drag on the Strongsville Club layout.

Thanks for lookin

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Nice cars Rick!

I got plenty done on my layout.

https://northcountrytrains.wordpress.com/2020/03/24/rebuilding-the-gp-mill-part-5-more-chain-link-fence-and-scenery/

https://northcountrytrains.wordpress.com/2020/03/27/rebuilding-the-gp-mill-part-6-scratchbuilding-a-pulp-tank-and-switching-focus-on-the-layout/

My next, and final step on the GP mill project (at least for a while) was to finish the scratchbuilt pulp tank. I constructed the tank using three Scotch tape spools. Rather than using styrene on the ends of the tank, I used cardstock.

I glued a connector pipe on.

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Looks good Harrison!

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Grwat work as always guys heres mine

I do believe thr Road painting crew had visited the nearby bar and grille before they went on the clock

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Rick … Thanks for starting Weekend Photo Fun . … Your PC boxcr and NYC gondola look fantastic. I like the PRR U25C’s.

Harrison… Your project is looking great so far.

Jimmy … I like your photo !

…

Below are photos of my rural scene with stockyard and grain elevator. It has been a while since I showed this.

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Rick: Thanks for getting us going again. Your cars are always well done. You must have plenty of storage space and/or a big layout!

Harrison: Scratchbuilding is cool. It takes some thought, obviously.

Jimmy: I like to loco paint scheme…custom I presume.

Garry: Impressive shots, looking realistic! I am paying attention to your scenery.

My week has included some progress on scenery; i.e., getting a first layer of something on flat or hillside surfaces. I am definitely in the learning mode.

On flat areas, I have a painted base with some Sculptamold variabliity from purely flat. There I have gone with trying out some turf and weeds, bushes for starters. I am figuring out what colors I like, but the 1st pass color/texture is Woodland Scenics fine Earth color. Then adding a smidge of other colors for some variation, plus some bushes, etc.

20200324_155608 by Paul Ahrens, on Flickr

The next issue is how to address the steep hillsides. I am trying a variation of a suggestion in Dave Frary’s book, where he mixes decomposed granite, sand and vermiculite. I am using decomposed granite, vermiculite plus fine & medium roadside (reddish) dirt that I had prepared years back in preparation. I am finding that I can start with brushing on 85% while glue where steep, and dusting on the mixture.

20200324_155636 by Paul Ahrens, on Flickr

[url=https://flic.kr/p/2iJgk1p][/url

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Rick: Thank you for getting us started on another hermit weekend of fun. That scene on the club ayout really has some deep scenery. It is beautiful.

Harrison: I did a lot of scratchbuilding in schooil and enjoyed it a lot. My stuff was certainly not up to Craftsman Kit standards, but I learned a lot of important skills and had tons of fun.

Jimmy: I like your scene. When turning onto East I-20 from the 75/85 Northbound connector in Atlanta there was about 1/4 mile of striping that looked very much like yours.

Garry: That is a beautiful sweeping countryside scene. You did a great job with the photographs.

Paul: I also enjoy building scenery. That bridge model will surely be impressive wneh the scene is built around it.

I have a “Before-And-After” shot of the Benchwork Test Segment to share this week.

Keep the weekend photos coming, this thread is always fun.

I need some fun right now, thanks everybody.

-Kevin

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Rick, thanks for starting the weekend. I really like the pipe racks – that may be something I will attempt in the future.

Harrison, thanks for the photos. Scratchbuilding has become my favorite part of this hobby.

Jimmy, I like the roadway, also. Like others, I have seen sections of highway that looked like that.

Garry, nice grain elevator. I also like how your backdrop blends in with your layout. It’s really difficult to see where one ends and the other begins.

Paul, I see you seemed to have solved an issue I had – getting material to stick on a steep embankment.

Kevin, nice pictures. I still have trouble believing your great work is just temporary. I’m not sure I have the nerve or patience to build a practice section. Of course, that’s what mine is now, but I don’t want to admit it.

My picture this week is another scratchbuilt N building. We have a cold storage building in town that looks something like this. I still need to add some pipes to the roof.

Thanks for everyone’s great ideas for more layout work.

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Some awesome work here, as usual.

I don’t have any locomotive builds or anything this week. Instead, my layout is getting decked out. [8D]

I’ll be adding lighting under the top deck to illuminate the underside.

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Great Stuff this weekend, folks!

Thanks for kicking things off, Rick.

I sure remember hundreds of cars like yours stored at Collinwood. My dad would take me there and I spent hours on the pedestrian stairway off E. 152nd. St.

Collinwood_shanty by Edmund, on Flickr

Off to the upper-right in this photo.

I wonder if anyone has decals, or better yet, dry transfers to “stencil” that brand new pipe? I recall seeing ID marks crudely stenciled on new pipes like that.

Your tanks and ‘fillin station’ are looking good, Harrison.

You have a nice scene there, too, Jimmy. Don’t sweat the lines. I’ve sure seen some crooked ones in my time.

Garry, I can almost smell the ‘fresh’ country air coming off that stock yard. I’ll never forget my first visit to Omaha!

Your scenery makes a great addition, Paul [bow]

I like your B & A scene, Kevin. I like the variation in the tie colors. Are you going to paint the rail sides in your final version?

Great warehouse/truck dock, John [Y]

Decked out Danny, nice work. I built my layout in 1995. Double-deck designs hadn’t really caught on back then. Today I would probably go that route.

I spent much of the week rehabing a few old Stewart/Bowser Alco Centuries.

It started out that I bought two when they first came out, then I found a sale price on a couple of ESU- sound equipped chassis, the price was like getting a free Loksound Select decpoder! These replaced an anemic, early DSD sound decoder from Soundtraxx I had installed originally.

[url=https://flic.kr/p/2iJjF9B]Bowser_Century_DC

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I painted the rail sides with Model Master “Dark Earth” because it was a pretty good match to Floquil’s “Rail Brown,”

Now looking at it, maybe the color is too light. It looks different in photographs than in person, but it is the photographs that matters.

-Kevin

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DTI 406 : I love that Gondola… ( I love any / all gondola’s, but your’s make’s me want to build a NYC gon of my own.)

TB DANNY : More close up’s of your rolling stock please ! I like what I have seen so far

Nice work everybody. Lets load this thread up .

My project’s this weekend: Tank car’s. The lettering is done, and I just painted the frame’s so, we will have to wait till next weekend to progress on those.

Auxilery water tender: I painted the main tank last weekend, and did a fair amount of weathering to it. ( It’s meant to look like a “Well used / abused” work car, so yea … it’s rusty ! )

I had to find a “Donor” for the floor so this boxcar got “volunteered”.

I will be filing down all 4 side’s/end’s and using stripwood to build the sides of the flatcar body… this could take a while… Ill post more when I finish the filing.

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I clicked the photo to enlarge it. Yes, I see now that your rail is painted, my bad [:$]

Perhaps a light coating of a darker rust powder here and there? Rail takes on many shades of color. New clean steel to pitch black (like at a fueling facility) with lots of shades of iron oxide in between.

Carry On, Ed

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I need to know things that might not look right. I built this segment as a test just for this reason. The next layout needs to be right. I will be painting the rails a much darker brown for sure.

Please keep the advice coming.

I experimented with a few exposure variations. Since I have only been photographing on the 30 by 30 diorama for a few years, I need to touch up on my layout photography techniques.

All of these pictures were take at f/35 and the ISO set at 100.

Three lightboxes on high, flash, 5 second exposure. The upper locomotive cast a shadow on the sky backdrop:

Two lightboxes on low, flash, 15 second exposure. I like this one best. The stantion shadows on the Trainmaster are well defined:

One lightbox on low, no flash, 25 second exposure. This one has better image cast of the white, but other colors look a little washed, especially on the upper bridge:

Flashlight only, 30 second exposure. A great way to produce night-time effects:

This is a lot of fun.

-Kevin

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Hello everyone. WPF has been busy already and its only friday in the USA. I managed to get my turntable bridge painted. It’s a diamond scale turntable I found at a swap meet for $50 for a 134’ table. The previous owner had done a good job assembling the bridge but the handrails were a mess and the center frame was all bent up. I made new handrails with phosphor bronze wire (much stiffer than brass and easy to solder) as well as the ladder cage one center frame.

I also added lights to the bridge. they are hooked up to track power to indicate when power is on.

I still need to weather the pit a bit. its too new looking and a bit too gray. I need to come back over it with a more concrete color. I used cheap acrylic paint to go over it and seal up the plaster so it doesn’t suck up the more expensive paint.

Before:

After:

I also was able to put on a primer coat on the 15 beer tank cars I have been kitbashing. Tomorrow the white top coat will go on, then 24hrs later a gloss coat. I still haven’t got decals done yet for them. Thats a whole other project.

They are hanging upside-down from my shop lights.

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Rick, Thanks for starting the WPF with appealing models, especially like the gon and it’s load of banded and blocked pipe.

Thanks to all the contributors and viewers, have a good weekend and regards, Peter

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They carry helium in those tanks cars?

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OK, Peter. If that is not real water in your picture, that is the most realistic water scene I’ve seen on a layout. Great job.

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Sometimes I get tired of Peter posting pictures of the real world and passing them off as model railroads!

Seriously, it is not just the modeling skill, but the way he can compose an image where it just looks like a snapshot from reality. Everything is there that is needed to make it believable.

Amazing, as always.

-Kevin

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Looks like real world events are providing an opportunity to get back to the workbench. That’s a good thing for this hobby. In my case, I’m just catching up with everything since we were supposed to have a train show this weekend that has now evaporated into this time in a year or so.

I’m not Frank, by any measure, but I did hack together one of the Wheel Works kits for a yard tractor.

It still needs detail paint in several places, plus glazing the windows and final assembly, but already looks presentable.

We ran similar yard tractors made by Capacity and serviced by the garage I used to keep track of parts for in an earlier life. The Cummins 6BT that powered them is a tough motor and is what also powers many Dodge/Ram trucks. One of our retired yard “jockey” drivers walks his dog through the neighborhood, so when I get it finished I plan to surprise him by showing it to him and maybe getting his pic with it. He’d get a kick out of that.