Jim Six sent a few images of his layout progress recently and gave permission to share them on the blog. Jim has been rebuilding his HO scale layout that reflects northern Indiana towns. He had grown dissatisfied with the layout that was featured in the 2010 Model Railroad Planning and has decided to focus on one main town. What follows are some notes and photos from Jim. Enjoy.
Clark Propst has been busy working on his new layout. He sent an update along for the blog.
The nickname Great Weedy was given to the Chicago Great Western Railroad, commonly known as the Great Western, hence Great Weedy. This moniker could be used to describe about any Granger secondary route mid last century. This is my inspiration for the latest layout work.
There’s a slight breeze but the air is hazy with humidity on this August day in Metcalf, Illinois. A dull cicada chorus surges to drown out other noises as we await Nickel Plate timetable train 49 to pass. A B&O switcher has paused to obey the signal in anticipation. The grain bins will be full soon as another local harvest approaches on the calendar.
A distant whistle pierces the air as the westbound blows for a crossing east of town. It’s time to move down to the tracks with the new Leica and capture a Berk on the mainline.
This is Metcalf on Tony Koester’s HO scale Nickel Plate Road, Third Subdivision layout. Metcalf is a town on the east side of the state just north of U.S. Route 36 where NKP’s St Louis line and B&O’s Indy/Decatur line cross. In the northwest corner of the crossing were located dozens of standard size “Butler” grain bins. Tony’s modeling the scene using several of our grain bins. As of now the bins aren’t painted. They’re in the natural grey casting color. We have plenty of these bins in stock on our Scenery Stuff page.
Peter Hall attended Train Fest last month and has filed the following report with the Resin Car Works home office. Bob Kosic sent along additional photos and details on the Mod-U-Trak HO scale layout. Click on any image here to review a larger size.
The venue was the Milwaukee State Fair Park’s new indoor arena. The area is about a football field wide and three fields long – huge. The crowd was over 19,000 for the two-day event. I hadn’t been to a model railroad event this large in a long time!