As part of my preparations for the upcoming Railway Modellers Meet layout tour in May, I have started noodling around with some basic scenery to hide the raw benchwork that currently dominates the layout room.  My original plan was to hold off on building scenery on the lower level until the upper level was completed, but I doubt I'll get much of the upper deck completed before the tour.  So some basic scenery will be roughed in to give a bit more visual interest to visitors.  I'm sure I'll be making chang

With the impending layout tour of the Hudson Bay Railway in May as part of the Railway Modellers Meet of BC I have realized I really should get back to working on the layout so visitors will have more than bare plywood and track to look at.  I decided I needed to mock up a concentrate unloading/thaw shed.

I was messing around with Vallejo steel airbrush paint a few days back and thought I would try to fix something that always bugs me: hopper cars with painted interiors, particularly ore cars and ballast cars. Pretty much as soon as they are loaded for the first time the paint is gone from the interior of these cars.

I have finally gotten around to priming some of my long abuilding resin freight cars.  Some have been "finished" for a decade or more in some cases. Work, moves, family commitments and the like had these projects put into boxes to be painted "later".  

It is now later and I spent the past couple of evenings gassing myself with Tamiya spray primer in my garage.  Definitely do not spray this stuff in a poorly ventilated space.  You'll see pink elephants and dragons if you do.  

One of the benefits of my job is that I get to fly around in helicopters.  On my recent trip to eastern Quebec we flew out of the airport at Havre St. Pierre.  The QIT (Quebec Iron and Titanium) railway bridge is just to the west of the airport, so I made a point of requesting the pilot to fly around the bridge so I could take some photos - one of the perks of being the boss.  He did so, and I am thinking I need to figure out a reason to have this bridge on my layout.  Not correct for my locale but pretty cool none the less.

I'm on a work related trip that has taken me to eastern Quebec, almost as far as you can travel by road on the north side of the St. Lawrence River.  This trip I have brought some model railway kits and my portable workbench - a small two sided plastic box that I have supplies in for trips like this.  I'll have to see how I manage with the Tichy kits I brought along.  

Something to keep busy with in the evenings

A recent addition to the motive power fleet in the form of an New England Rail Services GE 70T with MU and drop steps.  It is pretty much bang on for several of the HBM&S 70 Tonners used at the smelter.  I am planning to model #5 as it was one of the frequent engines I saw around the plant, and the brass version is vastly superior to the Bachmann rendering.

Since I started building the layout I have been expecting to use either the MBS (Manual Block System) or OCS (Occupancy Control System) method to control train movements.  My initial era (mid 1990’s) put it squarely into the OCS era.  I knew that CN used TT&TO until the early 1980’s but this was a bit of esoteric information for me when construction commenced.  Since then I have backdated to the 1980’s for my era, but I continued to expect to use OCS.    

The Railway Modellers Meet of BC was held this past weekend in Burnaby at Simon Fraser University. North of 100 registrants took part in 3 days of operating sessions, layout tours, clinics and camaraderie.  I was part of the organizing committee so it was really nice to see everyone's hard work pay off.  A few of my personal highlights in the following post.