Notes on Designing, Building, and Operating Model Railroads
A hobby adventure
Regular readers know my rail interests are focused on a point almost one hundred years ago, but the other day I witnessed a ceremony opening a modern rail facility. I drove about ten miles west of El Paso to the far western edge of Santa Teresa, New Mexico on May 28th. What was once a bare spot in the desert is now the $400 million dollar Santa Teresa Intermodal Ramp rail facility. Click on any image here to review a large size.
Continue reading “UP opens the Santa Teresa Intermodal Ramp”
We all experience ebbs and flows in our hobby activities. We can make furious progress on several tasks over the course of a few weeks then two months may slip by with hardly any activity. Tasks from beyond our hobby world can dominate the spare time, especially with spring weather blowing away the grit and cold of winter. I’ve been working on several different tasks, but few are far enough along or very photogenic to share here. The death of a friend has also weighed heavily on my mind. Less busy days are coming back around for the hobby tasks and I hope to share updates soon. Let’s recap a few model railroad events from the last couple of months. Click on any image here to review a larger version.
About a month ago I shared this lead image on Facebook and with a few friends. There were several compliments and a recurring question, “How did you do that?” Here’s a walkthrough of the basic steps I used on these hopper car interiors. Click on any image here to review a larger version.
Continue reading “Weathering Railroad Models – Hopper Car Interiors”
While it is not Spring yet, we did reset the clocks for Daylight Savings Time over the weekend and that adds anticipation for the upcoming season change. There are several Railroad Prototype Modeler events in the next few months for modelers to become inspired to move your model efforts forward. Here are the events!
Railroad Prototype Modelers Valley Forge – March 28-30 in Malvern, PA (metro-Philadelphia)
Western Prototype Modelers Meet – March 29 in San Bernadino, CA
Central Ohio RPM Meet – April 24-26 in Marion, Ohio
New England/Northeast RPM Meet – May 30 & 31 in Collinsville, CT
Bay Area Prototype Modelers Meet – June 21 in Richmond, CA
St. Louis RPM Meet – August 8 & 9 in Collinsville, IL
I strongly recommend attending one of these events to learn more about the prototype and new techniques to use on your model building. I’ll be attending the Valley Forge event and giving a presentation on the B&O Wheeling Freight Terminal prototype and layout update. I hope to see you there!
Blog Update
All of the blog posts here have been updated so all images appear again. There was a small coding problem that occurred with a software upgrade. It took a little while to figure out the problem and then some extra time to make the individual corrections, but that work has been completed and new posts are on the way soon!
At long last, I’ve been able to upgrade the blog software. It’s been a bit of a battle but all is updated and the comment area is functional again! I spent time creating a new header but no matter what I do to change the large, shaded box above, it won’t go away. It’s frustrating to follow the WordPress blog directions and change out the files, and then it doesn’t work. HO scale resin freight car kits are easier than figuring out the WordPress coding. Even those kits that lack directions!
As an addendum, I know many images are missing form older posts. It seems the software upgrade did not completely transfer all of the files to the new locations or assign the proper file address to the image. <sigh> I hope to tackle this issue by restoring images to a few older posts each week. The pages will be done as soon as possible along with a focus on 2013 posts. It will take some time but everything will be restored in the upcoming months. Thank you for your patience.
Hobby updates are coming soon as I’ve been busy on a number of projects. Thanks for checking in. – Eric