2018-01-11 - 1939 Railway Maintenance Cyclopedia Excerpt: Standard Lengths of Rails

2017-06-28 - Five Week Construction Sprint

2016-12-23 - Building Spline with Homasote - Time Lapse Videos

2016-12-18 - What I learned this month - December, 2016 - Calipers for Modeling

2016-10-12 - Plain Bearing Truck Weathering (Prototype)

A couple of weeks, I posted a topic on Railway Engineering and Maintenance Cyclopedias (http://model-railroad-hobbyist.com/node/32050). I really enjoy the once-contemporary detail contained in these and decided others might as well, so I've transcribed a couple of paragraphs from the chapter on rail.

Many years ago, I bought Joe Fugate's well-done video series about the construction of his Siskiyou layout. The section on Masonite spline roadbed convinced be to try the method. Having built several plywood cookie-cutter layouts over time, I was ready to try something different.  

I've purchased several calipers over the years, with the most recent (and highest end) set arriving this week.  That got me to thinking about their relative strengths for my uses and decided to share some thoughts with this community.

In the photo below are the four calipers I currently own - all have a 6 inch / 150mm range. From left to right, are:

I’m a steam-era modeler - and steam-era means plain bearing trucks.  Plain bearing trucks - especially the wheels - “dirty up” in a much different way than modern roller bearing trucks - they’re oily and gunky in a fabulous way.

I decided a while back that I would use rigid insulation foam to support the scenicked (non-roadbed) areas on my layout (at least in the flat areas). I later decided to use 2" thick foam to match my spline roadbed's height without having to resort to shimming.  I'd previously tried stacking two layers of thinner foam and assumed (correctly, as it turned out) that the thicker foam would provide a more solid base between benchwork supports. 

My layout is on a self-guided tour this weekend in conjunction with my NMRA Region's convention ("Rails to the Capital" - MCR).  Like most people, an event like this can lead to a flurry of work; in my case that involved rushing some mock-ups of some of the industries in Circleville, the current focus of the layout.  One thing, of course, always leads to another; the mockup work, specifically some reasonably precise plan-drawing and foamboard-cutting that requires good light, made the known weak lighting spots very obvious and somewhat problematic.  I.e., I need