Off the Rails

November is National Model Railroad Month

This fall I encourage you to participate in National Model Railroad Month, by sharing your hobby with others.  This may be through rejoining your Division, participating in its activities, volunteering at a Train Show, presenting a clinic, attending a layout tour, or working with a modular group or museum.  All of these activities have one thing in common, besides trains, and that is connecting with others who also love the hobby.  If you’ve been working in isolation for a while, take the opportunity to enjoy the hobby with others.  If you get the chance to share the experience with a friend or youth, please do so.  You will find that the world needs some more joy these days, even on a small scale like our model railroads.

Operations Research

Amongst my duties as President, occasionally I find that I have a few moments left to model!  Luckily, I am fortunate that I can enjoy some time away from the job, the yard work, and the recent disaster known as Michigan football.

My current project has involved making my car cards and waybills for my D&RGW narrow gauge rolling stock.  This has involved researching the Trails Among the Columbine’s book of Salida, where we have a portion of town modeled.  We are in the process of laying out the streets of West Salida, and I am trying to determine which industries we can fit in to the space we have, and which buildings we can fit and where.  The book has helped me identify the William S. Edwards building, used as the Salida Bottling Company, the Salida Coal Company, V.C. Davenport Lumber Yard, a harness/blacksmith shop, the Anheuser Busch Beer Depot, the Salida Granite Company next to the wye, the oil stand pipe to transfer oil, the Monarch Produce Company which transported Salida lettuce on American Refrigerator Transit (ART).  I also have the Public Steam Plant mostly built, a grocer, warehouse and tavern ready to install, alongside a freight transfer house. By studying the pictures and text in the book, we have been able to recreate much of the actual prototype history, which we are now modeling.  The goal is to model a representative piece of Colorado history, and operate the models within that framework.  

Figuring out car movements on the waybills has been a challenge.  It is fun to have the actual names of businesses to place on the buildings and waybills, with the address.  We also have a few fake names, and friend’s names, as this popular practice is done by many fellow modelers.  The toughest part will be when we get to operate, trying to read the car numbers on dozens of old weathered D&RGW brown narrow gauge freight cars.

Simple (in Front of the TV) Projects

On my TV tray, I took out three of my Mini-Classic trucks.  These have screws in the underframe, for easy disassembly.  I removed the cabs and extracted the seats.  I took one Model Power and a pair of Preiser seated figures, cut the legs off below the knees and carved them down to fit in the seats.  I then painted the figures and seats with acrylics, and glued them to the seats.  I also painted the shiny chrome grills with a dull silver, painted over the chrome side view mirrors (except for the mirror itself) with matching paint to the body color.  

For the trucks, I repainted the tires with a flat charcoal black to get rid of the shiny look, as well as the underframes. The stakebed floor on the 

Texaco truck I painted various grays. 

I repainted the neon yellow hubs on my Stroh’s delivery truck a dull yellow, and the yellow bumper silver. The ladder and pipes on the Bell Telephone truck were repainted and the garishly large ladder holders simply deposited in the scrap parts bin, and glued on the ladder.

After reassembling the trucks, they were treated with a shot of Dullcote prior to a dusting of my assortment of Bragdon weathering powders, finished with a final touch of dull cote to seal.  I wore a latex glove while spraying and weathering, so I could keep the windows from getting too dirty.

While I do these kinds of projects, I always include a few random figures to paint at the same time.