Eric Hansmann

RPM addendum

I enjoyed another RPM Chicagoland meet recently. A number of Pre-Depression Era modelers (the Pirates) attended, as seen in the lead image. That’s me, down in front. Two Pirates were missing at the time of the photo shoot. It was great to catch up with this group in face-to-face conversations and enjoy meals and drinks together. It’s been nine years since a couple of us began corresponding about railroads and industries of the 1900-1930 decades. We’ve learned a great deal from our collective and advanced our individual modeling skills.

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B&O freight houses

I’ve been reviewing many amazing images on the Historic Pittsburgh digital archive as research and planning continue for the next layout project. I stumbled into some studies that were done in the 1920s to improve road and rail traffic. A few photo and map gems were found while paging through “Railroads of the Pittsburgh district: a part of the Pittsburgh plan”.

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Weathering Ideas

Photo X4939, Railfan.net ‘erielack’ E-Mail List Photo Archive

I recently came across this 1926 image featuring a couple of boxcars on the Delaware, Lackawanna & Western railroad in New Jersey. Let’s take a good look at the weathering on these cars. They have obviously seen some mileage as the lettering is faded. Some streaks are visible from water and a little dust is apparent. But there’s much more here that we can model. Click on any image here to review a larger size.

The images on this blog post were originally taken by William B Barry, Jr., in his service as a DL&W company photographer. Thousands of historic DL&W photographs have been scanned my NPS Steamtown and can be found through the Erie Lackawanna E-Mail List Photo Archive.

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New Tool

I picked up a drill press stand for my vintage 1970s era Dremel Moto-Tool a couple of months ago. I found one at a decent price on EBay and bought it to do a better job on the bolster holes. I had used the Dremel for this task previously in a free-hand mode, but some holes were drilled at a slight angle introducing a slight lean to completed models. I needed to do better.

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Early Trackplans – 2

A couple of blog posts ago, I shared vintage personal trackplans that were discovered when clearing old files. I had drawn these in the late 1970s during my high school years. Shortly after the post appeared, I found a thin notebook with a few versions of the last layout plan featured on that post. In addition to the trackplans, there were numerous small structure drawings such as the one that leads this post. I had completely forgotten about these details.

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