For those who might be interested, I’ve set up a personal group on Facebook, www.facebook.com/groups/milanbranch, to journal about progress on my small Iowa Interstate branch line – the Milan branch. 

I have a large section of layout where I need to model a corn field. I looked into one of the best products on the market, JTT’s very realistic looking corn stalks, but it would be expensive when covering large areas. 

I then looked into the corn rows made by Busch and, bingo, nice looking stalks that cover quite an area per box compared to the JTT product. So, Busch it is. 

I was recently inspired by a video that Tom Klimoski posted on his YouTube channel showing operation on his Georgia Northeastern RR. In the video, Tom had a conductor figure placed where appropriate for the train moves. 

My small branch line is still far from full operations, but Tom’s video got me excited about the possibility of incorporating an actual conductor into my eventual operation. How could I use a figure in a way that was realistic yet not cumbersome for my operators? I decided I would figure out a way to make it work. 

Today I spent a very enjoyable day in Iowa City visiting with Colin O’Brien along with his good friends, Clark Cooper and Steve Malcolm. 

Progress is moving ahead on the layout with the development of the backdrop. As I mentioned in a previous post, I had recently been working on the design of a children’s book with a friend of mine who’s an illustrator, and she offered to create the layout’s backdrop. She works exclusively in Photoshop and uses layers to develop her paintings. Below is a roughed in section of the backdrop depicting the area around Big Island Road and the Rock River crossing:

We unveiled the working ProtoThrottle at this year’s St. Louis RPM, and from all indications modelers really enjoyed it. 

Below is a very short video showing one of our ProtoThrottles that we are currently beta testing on Joe Atkinson’s IAIS layout. 

I’ve been working on an approach for my backdrop and was planning to practice painting techniques for clouds and terrain. At the same time I’ve been working on a children’s book with a talented local illustrator over the last several months and she graciously offered her talent to create my backdrop. Incredible!

I have a maintenance of way truck that has been out of commission for several years and I decided to tinker with it to get it back running. 

The brass model originally had grossly oversized wheels and I wanted to replace them with scale wheels. I found the appropriate parts off of an HO scale cement truck.

As I’ve mentioned in a previous blog, I’ll be using brass G-scale switch stands a la Trevor Marshall to throw the 10 turnouts on my layout. The reason I’m doing this is to provide a more realistic experience for me and my operators working a small branch line. The G-scale stands are well constructed and are smooth operating, so it will be fun to throw the points real time in this manner.