ChrisNH's blog

This month I have a little progress on a few different things:

I have finally completed my AC Static Grass Flocker Mark I

I have practiced painting my bridge abutments

I have begun to ballast my track.

This is kinda silly, with the magazine coming out tomorrow my timing is poor, but here we go..

The July 2009 issue of Model Railroader features a track plan for the west end of the Maine Central's mountain division. Included prominently in this plan is the paper mill at Gilman Vermont. Since I am including this industry in my design as well, I thought it might be interesting to see what I came up with, too.

With the coming of spring my basement has once again become a hospitable habitat suitable for the migration of Model Railroaders. Once the wife goes back to work, I expect to have more time to myself to spend working on my layout. I figured it was time to fire up the Journal again..

I have finally completed putting the plaster/vermiculite mixture down for my scenic base and have painted it my basic earth color. I also got around to painting the valence. I will paint the facia after I complete my scenery. The next step is to put down the ground texturing which, per Joe Fugate's scenery DVD, is a mixture of plaster and dried tempera paint. This sifted onto the scenery base.

 Click to enlarge..

I have continued work on my scenery. The masking tape has been applied over the cardboard webbing and plaster has been applied over a small portion.

Now that I have knocked off the spray booth project I can continue with my scenery project. I am focusing on a tree-lined river being skirted by a causeway. I am drawing elements from the B&M running along the Connecticut River in Vermont as well as the actual operational location of the B&M crossing of the Johns River near Whitefield, NH.

I have finally completed my spray booth! I am excited to have this done, both so I can use it and so I can move on to scenery on my layout. To keep it from being prepetually almost done I stayed on the project as I found time rather then move forward with other things.

The inside has been painted white to seal it. I have little expecation that it will stay white. I will either repaint it or cover it in poster board as required.

This weekend my wife's sister took our one year old for the day (!!!) freeing me and Deb to head up to Vermont. I wanted to take some research photos and my wife wanted to hit the King Arthur Flour shop.

My trip to Vermont included some stops of interest to model railroaders. At an antique mall called

Queechee Gorge Village

I have finally raised the level of my water base in an attempt to mitigate what I felt was excessive height of my causeway and excessive distance between my bridge and the river. I think it helped. Below are some pics of the scene as well as a casting I made of a Chooch bridge abutment that has been cut down a bit in height.