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After being lured into traction modeling by my brother, I am flirting with the idea of building a 2x4 traction module based on the Terre Haute, Indianapolis & Eastern, a precursor of the Indiana Railroad interurban system.

This blog will follow my attempt at building a THI&E freight motor from a LaBelle Woodworking Nikes Manufacturing freight motor kit.

Dave

I finished the benchwork the other day - just about five weeks, start to finish on the 15'x17' lakefront division between Duluth and Two Harbors. Now I'm putting down homasote and using it as an opportunity to do a little stress testing. Gluing the homasote needs some weight... Probably not this much:

Interest in my previous post on backdrops was high, with several folks asking how I achieved my results. As I have several lengths of backdrops to paint, I decided to do a brief photo tutorial that runs through my method and explains more thoroughly each step of the process and what I am trying to achieve. I do want to give credit where it is due, and praise the work of many modelers but specifically Joe Fugate who's technique heavily influenced and guides mine. Despite this, I take a slightly different approach as any of us do with any technique to fit our railroad's needs.

I say experimenting because these trees did not get a glycerin wash to preserve the plant material.,But all in all, next year when these babys get harvested, I have a plan.

We redid our basement floors a few years ago and I ended up with about 30' of unused 3/4" oak quarter-round baseboard trim. I have since chopped it up into 3" lengths for cleats on each of the risers. I cut a few extra long cleats to allow for clearance in awkward locations where the riser won't fit right below the roadbed. 

As spline roadbed has started to wind itself through the (nonexistent, yet) hills of the Cascades, time waiting for glue to dry has been filled with a multitude of tasks from tuning turnouts, building turnouts, wiring, and most recently an endeavor into backdrop painting. Pictures of the new mountains below.

School activities are now taking my model railroad time with the FRC competition:

Quite a big project building a robot to do this from scratch! 

I figured the techy ones on here would be interested in this.

You can use this technique on all sorts of plastic model kits.

Kathy