During one of the recent NMRAx virtual meets, Miniprints.ca ran a contest for a $50 gift certificate. Since it only involved posting a couple hashtags to my Facebook page, I decided to enter.

And, rather to my surprise, I won. Then came the really fun part... deciding what of the many 3D printed figures I wanted to get (and what would be appropriate for my layout). Most of the figures offered were animals, and I do have a creek and a wooded area, so that seemed to be the way to go. And yeah, I spent more than $50 there... 

My fiend Joe D’Amato gave me some wood kirs a while back, one of them was complete, the other, not so much. But it did have a lot of lumber, some corrugated siding and board and batton…he’s also friends with the owner of Campbell Models in Oregon. Campbell doesn’t have any desire to make more N Scale kits, but their HO is a great source of inspiration…my inspiration for this is their Paint Factory…

Below are two photos of the elements on the top of a station i am modeling -- White River Junction Vermont.  I would appreciate any advice on how to model these- especially the steam engine -- a model of a model.  Both the vane and the steam engine will be about 1 CM length to scale.

I have one drainage pipe that feeds into the Rock River on my Iowa Interstate Milan branch layout. In preparation for modeling the drainage, I glued a piece of Stretch Magic cord from the pipe to the river to form a realistic looking arch. I'll now start to build up and sculpt the flow using multiple layers of Golden Soft Gel Gloss. The last photo shows the first layer of soft gel. Future layers will fill the pipe halfway and be wide at the opening then taper down to the river. The agitated water will also be built up via layers.