To Portland and Back, the NMRA Portland Convention..

I just returned from the NMRA Convention in Portland OR on the red eye yesterday morning.  I spent most of yesterday getting some rest.  It was an awesome week spent with many friends, some of whom I haven't seen in years! I haven't been able to attend a convention since the one in Milwaukee, so it was great catching up.  The LD SIG tour was great as usual, though I think I will be seeing Southern Pacific engines in my sleep! :p  Out of the 9 layouts we were able to see during the allotted time they were open, 6 were SP layouts.  Just Charlie Comstock's Bear Creek & Jackson (SP&S inspired), Larry Kennedy's Great Northern Stevens Pass, and Bruce Barney's Arrow Lake & Western (Canadian Pacific Boundary Div) were not SP themed layouts.  All the layouts were great, not a stinker in the bunch.  One layout I didn't get to that I really wanted to see was David Clune's On3 Cascade County Narrow Gauge RR.  It's based on the Nevada County Narrow Gauge RR but moved up into Oregon.  Dave lives in Eugene and that was 1 1/2 hours south of Portland, so we just couldn't get there in time.  In all, it was a great week of trains, great food and brew pubs, and friends. :)

OK back to things Ma & Pa, the answer to the last Where is this Wednesday was provided by Dick Bradley and you can find his answer in the comment section of that post.

Speaking of Dick Bradley, I'd like to congratulate him for winning the RMC Dremel Kitbashing Award in the September issue of RMC!  He did a beautiful kitbash of the Ma & Pa RR caboose #2003 as it looked before being rebuilt in 1936.  I didn't even know it had a end cupola before that year!  It's a great article and I urge you to check it out in the latest RMC. :)

The Mother Load!

I came across a seller on eBay who was offloading a ton of back issues of the Ma & Pa Society's publication, "The Timetable". I managed to win most of the auctions (thank you Auction Sniper :) though a few got away.  All told I picked up well over 40 back issues, some going all the way back to when it was just a photo copied publication with one staple holding everything together at the top.

I have been spending quite a few hours going through them and I've found some valuable info from interviews conducted with older retired Ma & Pa RR men.  They gave lots of great insight into how the RR operated.  Between that and the maps and drawings I'd say I hit the mother load!

Where is this Wednesday #18

Where is this?

If anyone is heading out to Portland for the NMRA Convention let me know.  Maybe we can meet up and talk about all things Ma & Pa RR. :)

Mitzel Coal Trestle ready to take deliveries..

After my last post I continued working on the Mitzel Coal trestle deck and I installed it after shaving down and painting the foam.  I also sprinkled a little bit of black sanded grout around it. The picture below shows the finished trestle.  Does it look convincing?  Let me know.

 

Wednesday Progress report..

This past week I worked on a few projects:  One that had been on the back burner, fixing the separating roofs on my two F&C Ma & Pa RPOs, the other was to build the top decking of the coal trestle for Mitzel Coal after thinking about how it would look for operators standing looking down at the scene.

Here trains 3 and 8 meet in Red Lion.  I know they probably never met there but let's say 8 was extremely delayed with mechanical problems that day. ;)  The two RPO's were bought on eBay awhile back but had a problem with the roof coming unglued off the top of the cars in the middle.  I got the roofs detached and filed down the car ends a little so the roofs sat somewhat flush.  Before I re glued the roofs on I added weight to the cars to bring them up to NMRA specs.

After last week's post I looked at Mitzel Coal trestle for awhile and realized that most operators will see the top of the trestle so something should be there.  Working off some drawings in my Ma & Pa RR Plan book 2 I made a reasonable representation of a coal trestle deck out of Central Valley bridge decks connected together.  I cut out for the coal drop, painted and weathered it, then glue on the rail.

I removed the track and roadbed from the trestle site.

Destruction complete.

Here's what it looks like looking down as an operator with the decking in place.  The foam will be painted black before the deck is permanently placed.

I then temporarily located the deck on the trestle location.  The foam has to be shaved down a 1/4 inch so the track on the deck matches up with the approach track.

I parked a coal hopper up there to see how it looked. :)

I'm pretty happy with what I was able to accomplish this week. 

Slacking off.. Not really..

It's been a few weeks from the last post and I've decided to suspend Where is This Wednesday for a little while, till I can come up with some more interesting pictures.  

Summertime tends to be a slow time for most modelers due to family vacations, summer out door activities.  Usually for me I have more free time during the summer months due to the fact that I teach and am off during the summer.  Any longtime follower of the blog knows Amy and I usually do our big traveling in the summer and we've been blessed to travel to quite few places in the world!  This year we will head to Bermuda for an easy trip and then I head off to Portland for my first NMRA Convention in a long while since going to the one in Milwaukee a few years back.  Another distraction that has come up this summer was the purchase of a vintage Honda motorcycle that I've been cleaning up and putting back to original condition, and also riding.  I've been riding since the age of 18 and the past 6 years have been the first time in my life since getting my license where I've not had a bike in my garage.  As much as I love our hobby of Model Railroading,  motorcycles have been a main passion for me since my teen years.

This is my 1979 Honda CX500C.  It's a bike I remember seeing in magazines while in High School and I always had wanted to get one.  It was in great shape when I bought it and I've been stripping off added on parts and cleaning chrome, replacing missing parts etc.

With the Honda being a distraction to a point, I've also been working on projects here on the layout.  One project that has been getting attention on and off has been the two Gas Electrics, #61 and #62.  61 has garnered the most attention being a kitbash and it's progressed up to the point you'll see in the following picture:

Detail work continues and all the mechanical items are sorted out.  61 runs great!  62 has gotten a speaker upgrade to a iPhone 5 speaker.  After seeing and hearing what my friend Kaylee Zheng was doing with the small iPhone 4s and 5 speakers in her modern Conrail diesels, I knew this was the way to go.  You can get these speakers on eBay for $4-$5 a piece and they sound as good or better than any Sountraxx speaker at half the size.  I'm currently working on a sound install on an older Bachmann Ma & Pa #27 4-6-0 and I'm using a 5s speaker in that engine.

I've also worked on some scenery shell, and some more playing around with paper buildings flats.  I'm tweaking two houses to be photo flats in Yoe and have installed a King Mills building flat to stand in for Red Lion Table Co.

The King Mills building flat installed on the Red Lion Table Co. siding.  Unfortunately, King Mills is out of the building flat business.  The copyright holder to the building photos has supposedly sold the rights to Scenic Express so hopefully we'll see them reissued soon by them.

I also got ambitious and mixed up some Ground Goup last night (that concoction Lou Sassie introduced to the model railroad world) and spread it out over some reworked sections on the helix.  Some also went into the Mitzel Coal and Lumber scene in the yard at York.  I have to thank Garden State Div. of the NMRA President Bruce De Young for reintroducing ground goup to me when he gave a clinic on using it at one of the GSD meets.  It's inexpensive to mix up and use and I like using it a lot better than Sculptimold. 

I gouped up the embankment that ran up towards the Mitzel coal trestle and installed the wooden fence I had just recently put together, painted and weathered.  All the pictures I've seen of this scene show that you cannot see the actual trestle because of the fence so I have not actually put in a trestle.

One thing about the scene in Yoe that has bothered me was the fact I didn't pay attention to the photos I had on hand and messed up.  When I installed the fascia I cut away too low and the scene wound up having the ground sloping down and away from the team track.  Photos show that the ground actually rises uphill from the team track.  
 

This photo shows the up slope away from the team track just beyond the depot. Photo by Art Kuperstein, all rights reserved.

My buddy Dave Ramos suggested I add a fascia extension which is what I did.  I then built up the scenery base to the extension and gouped it up.  

I guess you can see I've gotten some things accomplished despite the distractions of summer.  

BTW, Dick Bradley gave the answer to the last Where is it Wednesday and you'll find it in the comments.  Maybe I'll have a good photo and we'll post it for next Wednesday.

Where is this Wednesday #17

Where is this?

Postcard view, photographer unknown.

Sorry for missing last week.  I've been busy working on some projects and will update them on the blog soon.