Bravo!

Turned out great Joe. I know this has been your focus for the better part of a year and your hard work shows.

James

Captures the Essence

You've done an excellent job capturing the essence of the area.  The background looks very good also . . . the sky, clouds, haziness, etc.  The ground cover looks convincing and I like the wispy looking trees in the foreground also.  What did you use for them?  And of course, the structures look quite good.

Nice work!

-Jack

Excellent

That's some great looking modeling, thanks for sharing. I particularly like how you handled the backdrop and the transition to it. of course the rest of it is excellent as well.

John

Really cool

but I don't see the truck frame from the first photo anywhere in your montage (that's really the only thing I can pick a nit about).

Well done, indeed!

I love it when the photos of the prototype and the model look so much the same. You even reproduced that  crooked roof vent at the far end of the engine house!

Thank you!

Thank you all for the encouragement.  Very kind of you!

Here's an Andy Brown photo of the prototype turntable looking east on 6/20/2006:

Looking NW at the turntable, yard, and engine service area. The recently-added static grass is a mix of 4mm and 6mm Autumn to represent the tall dead grass in the turntable pit and surrounding area. 

The UP caboose was owned by a private individual and stored on the IAIS into the 1990s. It was gone by my era, but the model was a gift from my wife and my one and only brass model, so I wanted to keep it on the layout.

I obviously have some touch-up work to do on the fascia now that I'm done with the scenery here.

Prototype view looking south on 6/10/2005.

Layout view looking south at the trees I added yesterday, as well as the new pedestrian bridge (lower right) over a drainage ditch. I scratched it out of Scale Scenics micro-mesh, bits of wire, and Evergreen 3/64" rod and .060" angle.  The structures and sand towers here are all scratch built as well.

Looking north along the west yard ladder.

Trees and static grass added to the rise overlooking the west yard ladder. Here I used a mix of Late Summer and Autumn 4mm and 6mm grass.

Looking south at the enginehouse.

Model view of the previous scene.

Phil, good eye spotting the missing Geep truck frame!  It sat where the UP caboose is on the cleanout track, so I had to choose between the two, and the caboose won.   I could have put both there, but there's a little mini-scene to the left of that grounded NP box car where the prototype stores traction motors and stacks of pallets, and I wanted to leave a gap between that box car and the caboose so that could be seen.  I've been modeling the IAIS for 12 years, but I had no idea how many little details there are around an enginehouse scene like this until I started trying to build it.  I could work on this the rest of my life and still find new things to add.

Glad to see you posting on MRH

I miss seeing your work over on the Atlas forum (miss the forum too).   Like  I said over there, your outstanding work needs to be in the pages of MRH.  Yea I hear your scenery is not complete but it doesn't need to be.  You could always do a modeling a prototype. 

Anyway, thanks for sharing either way.  Remember you could get some good modeling $ for an article submission.

Steve

Thanks Steve

Thanks very much Steve.  I may talk with Joe F. sometime to see if he's interested, but right now I don't know what I'd write about that wasn't already covered in the MRP article.

I've been doing a lot of work in Microsoft Access over the past few months on a prototype-based user interface and report generator for my own use in setting up operating sessions (creating train, yard, and interchange lists for my crews), and for my dispatcher/clerk to use in updating car locations during a session.  It's documented at  http://www.iaisrailfans.org/gallery/Operations .  However, interest in it has been pretty light so far.

Lots o' Progress

It's nice to see the yard coming along.  I really like how the turntable area looks.

Fantastic!!

How cool is it to see the actual prototype scene and then see the modeled scene. 

Progress

Rob, a friend of mine showed me a photo the other day of how Bluffs Yard looked this time last year, right after your ProRail op sessions, and it was really an interesting before-and-after comparison - to me anyway.  I hope we can have ProRail back again someday, and hopefully have the layout looking a little more presentable.

Bluesssman, thanks for your encouragement.  When I'm viewing the work of other prototype modelers, I always get a kick out of seeing the associated prototype photos, so I was hoping the same was true for others.

One of my favorites!

Your railroad is one of my favorites!  Keep up the stunning work!

Nice Work

Great job capturing the look of the prototype, Joe. I've followed your progress on one of the other forums, and the level of detail that you've included in these scenes is fantastic. The scratch-built structures, the scenery, the backdrop, everything is just really well done. And I bet it looks even more amazing in person.

Tom Patterson

Excellent !!!!

IAIS Fan,

That is an excellent rendition of your prototype. Truly inspiring modeling. 

Thank you for sharing your work.  Can you tell me more about the trees you used?

John R

 Joe, you continue to do a

Joe, you continue to do a great job on the layout. It should get me going on scenery this Fall/Winter. Plus your Blogs on other forums. Your adherence to prototype modeling is very solid I hope you'll do an article for MRH also. I like your layout now and wonder what it would look like in current day with the newer locos. Great Job! 

Patrick Waltz 

Nice Work!

Great job! especialy since the are no proto type IAIS painted locos out there! Trust me .I tried to find some.

I like it a lot!

Very nice looking little yard Joe! You've done a great job of incorporating the details of the prototype into the modeled scene. Right down to the overcast sky! Nicely done.

Museum Quality thumbs up

Well....you've done it again. I really like the way the tree's and grass pull the rest of the scene in giving it a truly realistic look.

Looking great

Joe,

As always everything looks really good!!

Keep us posted on your progress...

Excellent work!

That's an impressive accomplishment for anyone, never mind someone who's never "gotten much past the benchwork stage."

​Backdrop: perfect shading to capture an overcast sky.  

Ground cover/grass and trees: nice work there. The complexity of different colours and shades make realistic vegetation challenging to pull off.  The combination of what you have going on here is looking great.

Perspective: I love how you're attentive to capturing the overall perspective from the photos of the prototype.  

In the first shot, it looks like you got a little carried away with trying to keep the facia from coming off  But speaking of the facia, I like your choice of colour.  It draws the viewer's eye up into the scene.  

​Brilliant work!

Thank you

Hunter, the rough-looking fascia (which definitely needs to be touched up) in the first shot was the result of some work back in April to narrow my benchwork and ease access to the east yard ladder, as seen at  http://www.iaisrailfans.org/gallery/4-21-2012-update .  A couple of the round items you're seeing there are adhesive screw hole covers - my lazy way of trying not to replace that whole piece of Masonite.

Apology

I realized after this blog went to its second page that I'd made a newbie mistake:  The nine photos I originally put in my initial post are obviously reappearing on every page, forcing new readers to page through them multiple times.  To simplify things, I moved the rest to a post further down on page 1.  My apologies for the trouble.

Joe, thanks for the info......

Are the companies you mentioned still making IAIS HO scale models? I would be happy with anyone that i could put sound and dcc in. I would like to make my layout more like the UP yard in Council Bluffs Iowa were i have seen the GP38s. Would be a nice mix instead of Armour Yellow every where LOL.

Small world

I believe all the models I mentioned are sold out, but all show up on Ebay fairly frequently.

So you're modeling the UP west of Council Bluffs, and I'm modeling the IAIS east from the UP's Pool Yard in CB,  http://www.iaisrailfans.org/gallery/UP-Pool-Yard-and-staging .  Small world!