I've been doing some thinking and planning, although no work :-( , about the next step on this layout. The trickiest part might be the walls in the monolith pit as I'll need a lot of wall panels, and they could be tedious to construct. More thinking, more thinking :-)
I've been focused on books for so long I'd forgotten about video, so I decided to search YouTube for Kim Adams videos. I had some great luck and I found this excellent new/old one. It was posted around 10 months ago, so it's relatively new, but it's of a lecture Adams gave in 2010, so it's relatively old too. It's long, around an hour and forty minutes, but if you've got the stamina, Adams himself…
To get an idea of the box size, the table top measures 2' x 4'. According to the box it's a Level 5 kit, and they aren't kidding :-) I'm taking a little break from model railway things. In my modelling time this summer I'm learning how to use the airbrush I bought last winter, and am using it on this giant Revell kit of the space shuttle's launch tower Debra gave me in the spring. I started the…
It's the long weekend. Take a break. Go for a walk. There's a private garden at one end of the community garden that borders the pedestrian path, and everyday, no matter what the season or weather, there's a new sign of encouragement to greet walkers and gardeners alike. This is a detail that will certainly need a place on the layout :-)
Galen asked me in the last Havelock yard post if I could tell if any of the data markings on the HEAPZ hopper appeared to have been freshly painted over the graffiti. I took a few other photos of that hopper from some other angles so I thought I'd re-examine them for clues. I couldn't see any, and I was standing so far away in the grassy picnic area near the parking lot I couldn't make out any…
Last week John sent me the link to this video of a flow visualization simulation created by Claude. It's quite impressive. I have no idea how Claude was used to create it, but it did remind me of my old, physical flow visualization windtunnel I built with Dave back in the late 80s. How times have changed. So, intrigued, I decided to poke around the Claude YouTube channel and I stumbled across the…
Every time I drop by the Havelock yard I keep an eye out for the Space Hopper . Given how long ago I first saw it, it's unlikely to reappear.....but, one never knows :-)
A check on element placement as the story develops. At this stage of construction I'm adding in scenic details I have in mind, and am checking fit, spacing, and composition as I go along. The layout's so small I don't want a surprise near the end where I find I can't fit in things I want without doing some crazy squeezing here and there. I should note I haven't finished the electronics on this…
From left to right: 6", 5" (the HO equivalent of the tightest TTC curve), and 7" radius curves. I'm having some trouble settling on a design for my Taronna layout. There are numerous problems. One significant one is figuring out what the minimum radius curve I can use that will not cause a problem for streetcars, and be reminiscent of the older, tighter curves in the TTC streetcar system. I…
The Mount Lowe Railway is featured in the latest issue of Voie Libre , #126, July / August / September 2026. I've only seen what you see over there on the left, which I saw in an ad that popped into my Inbox today. I submitted 46 photos - photos not seen here ! - so I'm curious as to which ones appear. I anxiously await its arrival in my mailbox! As they say on tv: Don't delay, get yours today!…
I was keen to see what the loco I had chosen for the community garden layout looked like in the paint scheme I had in mind. For reference, I started with a green MiniTrains Schöma diesel locomotive. The fictional story behind the new look is that the loco started life as a diesel, but was later converted to run as a pure EV machine with rechargeable batteries onboard powering an electric motor.…
Kim Adams: Bruegel-Bosch Bus | Kim Adams: One for the Road | Kim Adams I've written a lot about Kim Adams' work over the years, but I'm somewhat embarrassed to say that I've never gotten around to buying those three books shown above. Since I'm back to studying artists' use of miniatures , I figured this was a good time to have a look. These three titles span many years, and as the years go on,…
It's a small detail of course, but in my memory of the Pillsbury hoppers , if the truck side frames weren't blue as on the real ones I saw back in the '70s , then, well, it just wasn't right. After a little bit of colour matching, Vallejo Model Color Royal Blue 70.809 seemed to be the best match. So, I unscrewed the trucks from the bodies and brush painted the side frames. Sounds easy, right?…
A little earlier in the week the copy of Landscape Modelling by Barry Norman I ordered arrived in the mail. Like a lot of books I've bought recently it has been on my list for a long time, and finally one came up for sale online at a decent price. It's a clean copy, and there isn't any indication inside of who the previous owner was or where this book may have resided before coming to Canada. All…
I've started to work on the scenery by laying out the primary areas. There'll be 9 garden plots, or pieces of garden plots: 5 inside the loop, 3 bounding the outside the loop pedestrian pathway, and 1 close to the loco re-charging station (it's the gravel area with the repurposed porch railing as one of fences that bounds the 9th garden plot). The shed is tucked in a corner inside the loop. Beside…
Here's the link to the podcast . As part of their A History of the United States in 100 Objects podcast series the BBC features the biography of Thaddeus Lowe - yes, that Thaddeus Lowe, of Mount Lowe Railway fame - in episode 4 . His story begins at the start of the American Civil War, continues on through the creation of the Mount Lowe Railway, and ends with Michael Collins, Apollo 11 astronaut,…
A few years back I was undertaking an informal study of books about the works of artists who used scale models of one sort or another as their medium. Other interests took over and I parked the project. The last few months though I've felt a need to revisit that project, especially now that the Havelock micro-layout has reentered my thoughts . There're things I want to communicate with that little…
One of 4 (!) Pillsbury Hoppers bought at Van Horne Hobbies . You may recall that almost exactly 6 years ago I posted a few photos of brand new Pillsbury hoppers I saw in the Havelock Yard sometime in the mid-1970s. Then in the late fall of 2023 I posted about a micro-layout I built based on a mash-up of my current and old memories of Havelock Yard. One of many Pillsbury Hoppers seen at Havelock…
Spot the model railway store Getting closer... Closer... Bingo! John and I went out to Van Horne Hobby in Laval the other day. He'd visited in March and was blown away. Hidden away on the grounds of a road sweeping business is this lair of model railway extravagance: Upon entry .... Photos don't do it justice. Your humble scribe points out his personal Holy Grail. Many years have we searched! More…
I decided to take some glamour shots with all the pieces I've so far assembled to assess the composition. Once I finished testing the track in the pit I decided to do some odds-and-ends work that I had been putting off. This included: finishing installing the internal stiffeners in the launch pad section, finishing installing the walls of the blast trench under the launch pad, installing the…
R100 in Canada by Barry Countryman Published by The Boston Mills Press , 1982 There was a long trail of old mental associations that got me thinking again about this book, R100 in Canada . The short version goes something like this: The Dam Busters -> Barnes Wallis -> R100 airship -> R100 in Canada . Ok, the part I didn't make explicit in the chain was that Barnes Wallis was the engineering…
I spent some time over a few days installing the track in the monolith pit. I was surprised that it was quite a pleasant experience. I'd maybe work on it for a couple hours each day and almost immediately after beginning my mind would enter a flow state. I thought this would be a stressful job given the precision needed to get all the pieces to fit properly, but it turned out to be rather restful.…
From the article, N Scale Puts on a Show , Railroad Modeler , August 1975. The caption reads: "A fanciful N display was this 'city in a tree' built by Barry's Hobbies of Garden Grove, California. It just might be the thing to get N scale out of the garage and into the living room." I've been falling down on my review of the entire print run of Railroad Modeler, but hopefully I'm getting back in…
An image from the famous take-off scene in The Dam Busters . Three of the nine Lancaster bombers on their way to Germany's Ruhr Dams on 16 May 1943. I jokingly referred to the 1955 movie, The Dam Busters , in a post about busting beaver dams near the Havelock yard . I hadn't watched it in decades, so I rented a copy and sat down one blustery afternoon last week and watched again. I wasn't…
A people mover of dubious safety and legality From time-to-time I've been working on two pieces of rolling stock for the community garden layout: a people mover, and a compost gondola. I should have taken construction photos, but I wasn't in a documentation frame-of-mind while working on these. The people mover is basically a little flat car built from scraps of styrene, balsa, and wire on a Peco…