Blog Profile / Dan's Train Blog
| URL : | http://www.polyweb.com/dans_rr/blog/ | |
|---|---|---|
| Filed Under: | Transportation / Railway & Trains | |
| Posts on Regator: | 53 | |
| Posts / Week: | 0.2 | |
| Archived Since: | April 26, 2008 | |
Blog Post Archive
Magazine review: Model Railroad News
I found an ad somewhere for this magazine Model Railroad News (MRN) and went to their website where I signed up for their “3 free issues” offer. MRN has been published since 1995 so while it was new to me it’s not really a n...
Designing Crazy Horse Bridge
Now that I’ve framed out Crazy Horse Canyon it’s time to start designing and building the bridge. Building a big bridge like this is a bit of a chicken/egg exercise. The bridge is actually dictated by the track plan. The sce...
Starting the scenery for Crazy Horse Canyon
So far I’ve framed the canyon area and made a rough design plan for the bridge. Now I’m starting to rough in the scenery. First I put down a couple pieces of foam core board to be the riverbed and sketched out outlines of the...
Remembering Mike Stokinger
From the Golden Gate Model Railroad Club blog:
Last week, the Golden Gate Model Railroad Club lost a long time member and friend: Mike Stokinger. Mike was not only an active participant with the GGMRC but also a great person and very much involved with building the organization and ties with the model railroad community [...]
Ryan’s Railroad
Cross-posted from my Autistry Studios blog.
Ryan is another of our railroad-minded students and he chose to model a railroad yard. We used a classic John Allen Timesaver track plan and we added an Atlas turntable at one end.
We built the layout on a block of pink foam-board and glued 1/4? plywood on the sides and [...]
Erik’s Sausalito module
This is a quick progress update and a state-of-the-project report. Erik is one of our railroad-minded students at Autistry Studios. In the spring we brainstormed ideas by collecting and organizing photos of scenes that Erik liked.
We found several trends in the photos that Erik liked and the one we focused on was Northwestern Pacific Railroad [...]
California Railroad Museum
Last week we took the Amtrak Capital Corridor train from Emeryville to Sacramento and walked over to the California State Railroad Museum. I had never been there before and it is really a great place.
Pretty winter day in Old Sacramento.
We had the place pretty much to ourselves in the morning.
There are more photos at my [...]
Finally Foothill Station
In the summer of 1988 I worked at The Roundhouse model railroad shop in the North Hollywood/San Fernando valley area of Los Angeles. I really enjoyed that summer job and bought several kits while I was there. One of them was Detail Associates kit number 7003, Foothill Station.
I’m very happy I recently finished the kit [...]
Northwestern Pacific and California in the 1920’s
I prefer to model the 1920’s. I settled on this era in a process I outlined years ago. However, I was not alive in the 1920’s. My parents weren’t either.
My grandmother died over ten years ago and while she was born in the teens she was pretty young in the 20’s. I want to have [...]
Learning a bit about diesels
I’m not a big diesel guy. I like some of the early unit passenger trains like the Pioneer Zephyr and M-10000. I can usually tell E units from F units and I love the early slant nose E units like the E3 or the E6. I like steam and pre-Super Power steam at that (that [...]
Review: Model Railroad Hobbyist magazine
I’m generally sad about the state of model railroading magazines. In August of 2006 I started a series of blog posts analyzing what has happened to Model Railroader to make it the raging wad of mediocrity it is today. I grew up loving MR. I have 46 years of MR back-issues in the loft bookcases [...]
The Walt Disney Family Museum
Walt Disney was a model railroader. Indeed, his idea of Disneyland was as a huge walk-in, live-in complete model railroad. Recently the Walt Disney Family Museum opened in San Francisco.
We just went this morning and it is a very nice display of the work and life of Walt Disney.
Photography is prohibited inside but some [...]
Basic terrain layout question
Mike recently commented on Nick’s next railroad and I wanted to respond in detail.
Dan, a couple questions for you. I recently got back into model rr after only doing it as a kid…and those were the days when we’d run them like racecars to see if we could get train cars to tip off the [...]
Nick’s next railroad part 1
Having had so much fun with our first micro layout, Nick wanted to move on to something more ambitious. After pouring over my 30 year stack of Narrow Gauge & Shortline Gazettes Nick wanted to do a small lumber layout and we chose On30.
Bachmann On30 Porter 0-4-0s can negotiate a 12″ minimum radius and Nick [...]
Great decal application tutorial
David Lyman a.k.a. Dan D. Sparks posts a great description of how he makes and applies home-made decals to his Birney car project. really nice work.
I did not want to steal any of his great photos but you should go see them at his site.
Just horsing around
There has been a wave of Warhammer 40K modeling and game playing sweeping my place of employment lately. A common scale is what is called “25 mm” and is taken as 1:72 scale.
I think the methods routine in this modeling genre can be really effective for HO modeling. I found a horse that no [...]
Nick’s Railroad Part 5
Finishing up!
Nick uses plaster-cloth to cover the hillside above the tunnel.
We painted and ballasted the track, added a retaining wall and added an initial layer of dirt-glue-celluclay ground cover.
Ready for trim: we cut some pieces to cover all four sides.
Gluing the trim.
Now for some grass and trees.
Pretty much finished.
Our one structure is an outhouse.
Nick’s Railroad Part 4
Continuing with construction of the bridge.
Using a “storey pole” marked with the locations of the bents, we shaped each bent pretty closely to the contour of the ground where they would be planted.
Then we glued the bents to the span — laid out upside down on the bench.
Once the glue dried a bit we [...]
Nick’s Railroad Part 3
We started building out the bridge abutments by cutting away the Styrofoam and making a retaining wall out of scribed siding a stolen from an old Campbell tunnel portal kit.
Note that we pre-stained the wood with a simple ink-alcohol mix. Here’s the other side of the bridge.
The temptation to play with a train is just [...]
Nick’s Railroad Part 2
Continuing our build out of Nick’s HO micro layout.
Once the base was set up and roadbed established we started to build up the hill and tunnel out of 4? thick Styrofoam.
We cut a mock tunnel portal for sizing.
Then we gave everything that would become “ground” a good coat of dirt-colored latex paint.
Then we started preparation [...]