Weekend Update 7/20/14

[up1950s]

[mmagliaro]

Hey Richie... COOL... I actually live there now!  "The hardest working bridge on the Willamette River"

Okay.. sooo... some fun with a little scenery and black and white (enjoying my actually-operational layout!);



It's 1954, and SP&S 603, refueled and coming down the ready track, heads toward the wye where it will back down onto today's assignment, "The Oregon City Limited", headed to Portland and Vancouver, WA.  An excited young
railfan takes this shot looking down from his 5th story window on Inez Ave, just across the street from the yard.
The shiney Loewy-inspired "North Coast Limited" in the background is a foreboding of things to come.
By 1955, the sturdy well-used Atlantic will fall under the scrapper's torch.

(All dates and train names are completely wrong.  And this engine was actually scrapped in 1949.  But it's my little
world, and that makes me happy. )

[Jeff AKA St0rm]

Had some time (not much) to work on the layout this week. Started to shape the river banks

[basementcalling]

20140713_145123 by peterkoehler-pfotenhauer, on Flickr

Think I'll try and duplicate this weathering on a covered hopper.

[up1950s]

I guess us non Yahooers don't get to see .

[BCR 570]

My first week of holidays was spent cleaning apartment and cars, but I am hoping to get back to work on the layout after a long hiatus.  I have cleaned the track for the operational portion of the layout and have been enjoying running trains again in hopes of getting motivated to work on the layout.  I spent some time this week trying to improve the operation of the couplers on my Prairie Shadows bulkhead flatcars.  They needed a test run up the helix and back, so the task fell to C-425s 812-810-804 which were just returned from a visit to friend Michael Batten's E&N layout.

Crossing the East Pine River:




Cresting the hill:




A close-up of 812-810-804 for the resident ALCOholics:




Tim

[mandealco]

Always like seeing your Alcos Tim.
Cheers
Steve

[BCRail_FSJ]

Playing around with trees.  Low cover is Woodland Scenics foliage clusters and fine leaf foliage.  Then I added a few home made aspens.   The quickies in the back are just polyfiber draped over painted toothpicks with a dash of ground foam on top.   They are OK, but I still think they look more like willows than aspens.  Perhaps a few conifers mixed in will make them look better.



I made one tall aspen out of twisted wire, which was painted and then topped with polyfibre foliage and a dusting of ground foam.  It looks much more like the tall aspens in northern BC, but takes much longer to make than the toothpick variants.   



Whatever method I use I will be making a lot of trees both for this diorama and the layout.

[BCR 570]

Hi Andy:

I have been wondering how to make those northern aspens for a long time as I am going to need a lot of them.  They have such a different shape to them up there.  I will watch your experiments with interest.

Tim

[Chris333]

Spun the layout roulette wheel and landed on Nn3:


It is 11.5"x23" and will be my new much simplified Carbon Limestone layout.

[VonRyan]

Spun the layout roulette wheel and landed on Nn3:


It is 11.5"x23" and will be my new much simplified Carbon Limestone layout.

That makes this... version 4 of the Carbon Limestone co.?

[bnsfdash8]

I've been working hard on my SD70 conversion.

[BCR 570]

Always like seeing your Alcos Tim.
Cheers
Steve

Thank you Steve - the C-425s are easily my best runners and I enjoy operating them.


Tim

[flight2000]

Another week, another wreck... 

Didn't come out exactly how I planned, so I'll keep experimenting with different techniques to create uneven fading.  In the end, I still like it.  I also really need to start messing around with Z Scale couplers.

Cheers,
Brian

[wm3798]

It's time.

More info in the Layout Engineering Reports thread.

Lee