I finally made the effort to shoot some pictures of my prototype, or at least what's left of it as it stands today.

I have a gallery,  Railroad Photography, and hopefully others may find some of these pictures of use.

Cheers!

My son has been married for a little over a week and things are getting back to normal. He and his wife got an apartment near us so that means he comes to the house several times a week and goes shopping in the pantry and refridgerator. It's not really a problem unless he takes something I was planning to eat later or the next day. That isn't so bad as I can easily replace what has been "borrowed."

Been awhile since I did a blog, so I'm catching up a little today.

Here is the lastest Withlacoochee River Report, the blog that will highly offend one with my compelling rhetoric!

Back about 25 years ago, I built a flush door N scale layout that never made it beyond the "Flush Door Pacific" stage before giving it up as I was frustrated with N scale performance. I did keep some rolling stock, about half of it Micro-Trains. Earlier this year, my wife convinced me to at least give N scale another chance, so I purchased the Bachmann Spectrum 2-8-0 which is the subject of the two pictures below. Somewhere along the line, I had purchased some Detail Associates steam parts for reasons I disremember.

These are the mountains I am Keeping. I still have some touch up like repainting the sky along the left side of one mountain where it's all white and looks like a heavy snow hit there and a few minor areas other wise these are it.

Notice the Green at the botton of each picture this is the basic tree line the under coat and I still need to paint a few thousand trees so the line will NOT be so straight once I add the trees and in fact you won't be able to see this color once the trees are added.

On another forum there was a discussion about diffraction losses in lenses at small f stops as applied to using Helicon Focu. So I decided to do a test to see how much diffraction loss my Canon 5D experienced with a 50mm Macro lens. These three shots are all shot under the same conditions with only the f stop varying. The three shots are at f32, f8 and f2.5. The original images shot in RAW and maximum quality jpg.

I have had tips and names of books sent to me trying to help me in my attempt to paint the rocky Mountains from Ridgway to Ophir Colorado but they are all examples of paintings miles away from where My model is taking place. The areas I'm trying to paint are in the middle of these Mountains not in the distance  http://backdropwarehouse.com/SkMtsGrp.htm#41 check out the Three San Juan Mountain sets the stations and the RGS railroad runs through these not 20 miles away even these Mountains are many miles too far away from what I'm trying to paint.

Work has finally begun on converting a stock, undecorated Atlas S2 to represent the Central Vermont's #7917 circa 1956.

I chose this loco and this year as it had some very unique visual features including a long toolbox forward of the cab, and triangle shaped number boards.

To prepare for this project, I had opened another topic that proved to supply some additional historical data, and some great ideas on the parts to be used. I won't duplicate that post, but you can see it here.

I just looked up my last blog entry and found that I haven't posted one since July 15 so it's time for an update.