What I've Been Up To Lately

Here's a brief selection of what I've been up to lately related to model railroading.  If you haven't caught it by now, I like to jump all over the place on various projects.  Fortunately I seem to actually be bringing some of them together so they're starting to make sense (and trust me, for a while I was wondering if they ever would!).

I continued work on the mill and powerhouse kit that I had started on a few weeks back.  I've built, ripped apart, filed down, and re-built that darn cupola now 3 times.

You can see under the power house are 2 sets of walls, glued and re-enforced, waiting for assembly.  Something I've noticed about this kit, and perhaps these are attributes of plastic kits in general or perhaps this is more a commentary of this kit's manufacturer...

1.) There are a ton of tabs and sprues.  I'm pretty sure I spend more time trimming sprues and filing down/cleaning up parts than anything else.  This is one area where I think I preferred wood kits.

2.) The pieces fit together like crap.  This may be related to the manufacturer, but I'm constantly running into situations, the cupola is a great example, where things should fit together at a 45º angle but the parts come cast to a 90º angle.  I've had to file down every roof pitch line, etc.  I'm starting to feel like this is becoming a bit more of a scratchbuild than a kit build.

I sat down to work on this kit some more last night and towards the end of the evening I reached over grab the glue brush and... knocked the entire bottle of liquid cement over.

I surveyed the damage this morning and it's not too bad.  I'm hoping a nice coat of paint will cover that up but I might have melted off too much brick detail with that "oops".  To make it worse I'm not completely out of styrene liquid cement.  Ah, you win some you loose some.

Being the Christmas weekend I decided I wanted to put in some carpentry time on the layout as well.

Earlier this week I was down in the basement surveying the state of the layout and I had an idea.  Previously I've mentioned how I don't care for peninsulas because they require a return loop that is harder to plan around.  Well, I decided to "embrace the cliche" and just have a rounded trestle on that return loop.

Yes, I know, I know.  It's overdone.  At the same time it's over done for a reason.  Looking at the benchwork I had, I realized I could cut down the existing L-girder framework, shaving off 2 feet, and then use the cut off plus some craps I had to build a smaller frame to support the end trestle.

The end result is what my wife would refer to as, "a baby one".  I clamped up a quick fascia to it to get an idea what it might look like, and here it is...

Hopefully I won't get into the spirit of "lazy holiday" and I'll put in some more time on the layout.  Things are shaping up a bit and I can see that soon I might have most of the carpentry completed.