Maryland Midland 305 crosses Little Pipe Creek.

I model the Wilmington & Northern Branch of the Philadelphia & Reading Railway, set in 1903.  My line serves numerous industries related to the iron and steel trade, so I always have need for gondolas.  This is how I kitbashed a model of a P&R class GMd gondola, an early steel gon.  1250 copies were produced by the Pressed Steel Car Co in 1900 and they served until 1934.  My car is kitbashed from an Athearn 50 ft gondola shell and a 36 ft MDC cast metal underframe.  This simple kitbash can be done in a day and will fit right in on any pre-Depression era

This build blog will feature building a Bethlehem Car Works C&EI RPO/Combine kit in HO scale.  

Model and photo by my friend Jack Sartori, his build.  

As with many model railroaders, when you're in the hobby for a while you accumulate a wide variety of projects. Often having "several" on the go at once.

I was getting to the point where I had bits and pieces from various projects scattered over my workbench, with various parts in various old leftover kit boxes. This organization left something to be desired, so I got some foam core sheets and made some "standardized" project boxes, so that I could simultaneously achieve several goals:

- clean up my work space

Hello group,

Construction is under way on a background building for the SMR.  It comes from a long out of production kit picked up at a sale years and years ago.  One problem is that there a gaps in just about every seam where the white columns meet:

Well, I have been working on the AGG concept for a long time in my mind and building a few models here and there but wanted to official introduce the AGG and give a little info.  The AGG, in concept, is a struggling small regional trying to have a go at keeping several old Southern/CofG lines going after being left for dead by Sou/NS.  There are a couple other small short lines in the Florida Panhandle that also were obtained.  Kind of like a Gulf and Mississippi type operation.  The early lines were all in SE Alabama and included the ex-CofG line from Montgomery to Eufa

I've been sitting on this project now for a couple of months trying to figure out what to do with it.  The project actually started with building the bench work seen above out of scrap pieces of wood laying around in storage.  I'll get into the details of it later, but for the moment the bench work is a self-contained box designed to be a portable exhibition layout. 

I've spent the past year learning how to write better, working, and improving other areas of life (including finishing up my education).  So all my hobbies had to take a back seat for a while.  Anyways, I recently decided to build a full-on movie camera out of my Sony a6100 for upcoming projects.

One problem with Sony cameras is that their normal battery, the NP-FW50 battery does not last very long when recording video.