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What’s on the workbench?
I haven’t written much lately but I’ve been building a LOT. As I mentioned in July, We moved to a new house with a workshop . The plan was to use the shop space for the layout (of course) and a...
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Nick’s Railroad Part 1
Nick joined our “build stuff” group with no idea what he wanted to build. We suggested he look though our library of books and he saw my copy of Stindt’s “Northwestern Pacific Railroad” and started...
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On30 minimum radius?
It looks like we’re going to be building an On30 (not On2-1/2!) micro layout and the typical question has come up. When you say “micro,” how micro do you really mean? We want to run trains...
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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...
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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...
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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....
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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....
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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...
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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. Photo by David Lyman, Dan D. Sparks
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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...
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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...
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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...
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Review: Model Railroad Hobbyist magazine
Note: This review is my own opinion, unsolicited, and based purely on my experience as a customer. I’m generally sad about the state of model railroading magazines. In August of 2006 I started a...
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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...
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Capturing the mood of an era: Northwestern Pacific and California in the...
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...
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Finally Foothill Station
In the summer of 1989-90 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...
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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....
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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...
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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...
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Remembering Mike Stokinger
Published in San Francisco Chronicle on October 17, 2010 Mike Stokinger A long time railroad buff and friend of many, died Sunday September 26th, he was 56 years old. There will be a gathering of...
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