The prototype unit:  3543 as seen here in The Pas, photographed by my friend Rolf Stumpf in 2000

...do some prototype research.

A work trip has taken me to Thompson Manitoba, which just so happens to be part of the Hudson Bay Railway route.  While I won't be modelling Thompson directly, it does offer me the chance to do some research on my prototype area. 

Conventional wisdom has it that the CN ore jennie fleet all had 4 side ribs to support the lower hopper of the car in this style: http://www.cnrphotos.com/gallery2/main.php?g2_itemId=16437 .  Unfortunately no one makes an exact model of this car, most models are of the more common  Missabe car version with 2 support ribs: https://digital.library.cornell.edu/catalog/ss:20864701.

I found the holy grail of freight car modelling: both sides of the same car from roughly the same time period. I have a few of these TLT slab side hoppers I will be modifying to reflect their state in the early to mid 1980's. Surprisingly a few survived in their as delivered scheme (modified) until they were retired.

As part of my research on traffic patterns in northern Manitoba for my layout, there are obvious sources (mines, concentrators and smelters, pulp mills, sawmills, grain, fuel, propane) and less obvious sources like fish. 

In preparation for the upcoming Railway Modellers Meet  (http://railwaymodellersmeetofbc.ca) layout tour coming to my layout room on May 4th I've been madly cleaning and preparing the room for the onslaught of people expecting to see something interesting.  

Now that I have gotten the fascia added around the layout I am working on getting the support structure for the upper level on the peninsula roughed in.  a 2x3 wall down the center of the peninsula will provide the support framework for the upper level.  As well this wall will let me add shelving under the layout to clean up some of the stuff under the layout – hopefully.

This weekend I had a work bee with a friend coming over to help push the layout forward.  Chris took on the challenging job of fixing some problematic switches, adding switch machines and wiring them up so they have live frogs. 

Of course he asked how to identify the wires for the frogs: why, they're green of course.  Everyone knows frogs are green...

Over the past weekend I spent some time making the Flin Flon smelter area look more industrial.  A few years ago I bought a CD of steel industry textures and kits from Clever Models <http://www.clevermodels.net> with the plan to use some or all of the items on the CD on the smelter and other areas.