Tuesday night happenings Oct. 29. 2013



View block has a base coat of paint



Fourteen members formed Tuesdays work crew.  Ballasting continued and a switch was relocated from behind the coal mine.  The view block was painted a base coat as work continued on the branch line.  More wiring was completed and redone (where someone relocated the track). Discussion was held on town names.  All and all, a lot of fun, not to mention how much was completed. Thanks Rick for the bulletin board. A couple of base templates were brough in by some members, guess what, some track and scenery adjustments are in order.

Ballasting crew at work

Harbour scene on the branch is taking shape

Part of Hank's trestle installed on branch

Spotlight on Don Pearce

My history in model railroading must have started when I was born in 1947.  I was raised on a farm right next to the New York Central Railroad.  It must have been those steam whistles that I heard all day and night at the crossing just down from the farm house.  I still have a few memories from those bygone days. I received my first train set when I was five years old, it was a Marx set.  When Christmas came along the next year my farther had purchased more track and switches and I remember waking up and the living room was completely filled with track and trains. When I was about fourteen I bought my first H.O. train set from money I earned working on a tobacco farm.  I bought a 4x6 piece of plywood and had this set up in my bedroom. Model railroading took a break for some time till I finished high school.  When I finished at Fanshawe College I joined the O gauge club of London.  After moving back home and started working, I tried out some N gauge but found it hard to work with. After getting married my wife encouraged me to get my H.O. equipment  unpacked and started to build a layout in our basement in Sweaburg.  This is when I met a good friend Ralph Tayler another model railroader in H.O. scale.  A few years later Ralph had to abandon his layout and move to Woodstock and about the same time, another friend, John Schell had to do the same with his layout.  Shortly after I also had to do the same, and since I was the only one with a basement, I asked these two gentlemen if they would like to get together and build a join layout.  This was over twenty years ago now and that was the start of our present dar layout the "Ontario Western Railroad ".  We had to dismantle it for a move to a new house.  This gave us an opportunity to try different designs in layout planning.  The new layout being two levels, walk around control with Digitrax and above all, no duck unders.  Since then we have grown to about a crew of eight operating today. Now the latest chapter in my model railroading history is joining our new group in town, The Woodstock Model Railroad Club or The Huff and Puff, as my wife refers to it. Remember to have fun and enjoy this wonderful hobby of model railroading .

Oops by Larry Brinker

When I was about ten, I was allowed to use an old farm table in an upstairs bedroom to set up my Lionel empire. Well my empire kept coming apart on the smooth surface. So I fixed it, yes I nailed it down, who lets a ten year old upstairs with a hammer and nails anyway?

Roadbed painting.

We wanted to paint all the used ceiling tiles we used as our roadbed, earth colour.This sure helped keep down the dust.

Jim and Trent are seen painting in the picture below.

Trent, one of our younger members trys out painting.

Tuesday night Oct. 22, 2013

Ballasting and wiring continues and some mountains take shape. We have started to build some scenery in areas where the trackwork is complete.Pictured below is a foam mockup of a hill that will act as a view block between the cement plant and the quarry. Between operating sessions loaded and empty hoppers will be 5 finger switched.

Profile of the hills around the return loops

Don and Jim work on the hill dividing the quarry and the cement plant

Tom works on some castings.

Cimarron 1 Mine

Ralph Tayler build this great module of the Banta Modelworks, Cimarron 1 Mine.

Handy little storage case by Larry Brinker.

I bough a weekly  pill dispenser at the Dollar store, and relabeled it to hold my track laying supplies.

Spotlight on Jim Long

  Autobiography by Jim Long. My interest first came from railroad connections on both sides of the family and grew from there. My grandfather was a steam locomotive mechanic at the CNR roundhouse in Dauphin Manitoba and my father in law was the express agent for the CPR in Ingersoll 60 some years ago. I have been involved with models and modelling for close to 50 years and have had a couple of layouts as time would permit. I currently have one smaller layout that is somewhat complete [no layout is ever exactly the way you want it to be] and another slightly larger set up is in the beginning stages. The large layout gives me the opportunity to meet with others who share a common interest and to learn and be amazed at the diversity of skills and talent we have to draw from.

Buckley Mill

I saw a neat mill on a iPad game and decided to build one for the club.  I approximated the size and made a mockup of it.  The main structure is made of board and batten strip wood with scrap wood interior bracing.  Part of a single stall engine house was added as a boiler house

Cement Plant

Glen first built a mockup of the plant to hold the area needed for this sprawling structure.



completed model

Spotlight on Glen McDonald

(Glen McDonald was the first member to step up and give an account of his railroading history) My personal model railroad history goes back to Lionel and other tinplate trains in my youth but no operating layout until I came back to Canada after teaching Canadian military personnel children in West Germany in the mid 1960's. I brought N gauge Arnold Rapido trains back with me and set up a European style layout that satisfied me for a time. My older doctor brother was and continues to be a total train chaser all over North America. My sons and I joined him at times riding Norfolk Southern's original F1 from Lexington, Kentucky to Chattanooga, Tennessee and seeing the original Steamtown in New England and latter in Pennsylvania. We have paid our homage at Horseshoe Curve near Altoona and the list goes on. I started collecting HO locomotives and cars in the mid 80's and now have a temporary basement layout which will not proceed further as I am not a lone wolf and our new Woodstock Model Railroad is the way to go for me.

Glen is shown helping ballast track

Harbor Front Buildings

Harbor buildings Scratch built after Sam Cahoon's Moorings a model on Bob Hayden and Dave Frary's, Thatcher's Inlet layout. The walls are a combination of clapboard and board and batten siding. Roofs are leftovers from other projects. The buildings were weathered with various washes and ground chalk. Signs and other details were added. The front deck was made of scribed siding, stained and then sanded to suggest heavy traffic patterns.

Spotlight on Larry Brinker

This is the first article introducing our club members and their model railroading journey. Like most, my first train was a Lionel .  I got to use an old farm table that was in an upstairs bedroom, to set up my empire.  Next, I built an interlocking frame of 2 X 2 inch lumber in shop class at school.  Thank goodness it was too large to put together at school as I miscalculated some of the notches.  I never finished that empire.  Then life happened, work that is, so model railroading took a backseat.  One day I saw a Postage Stamp Train set, wow, this will fit in an apartment, won't it?  I moved to a house too soon to finish that one.  Life happened again ( kids) but I did get back to it by building a double decked N scale layout. Then I visited Don's layout one day, he hasn't noticed yet so I just keep going back.  That's where I got the bug for HO, so I now have a back woods, mountain railroad call The Grants Pass Railroad, (you can see it by going to grantspassrailroad.blogspot.com ).  Now we have a railroad club where I get to model railroad with another great bunch. That's me in the red sweatshirt , writing something important (I'm sure) on the bench work .

Bonaparte Woollen Mill

The stone building are cast from a borrowed mold.  The castings were glued together and interior bracing was added, including roof bracing.  All the window and door sills were painted light grey.  Using earth tones, many individual stones were painted and a thin black wash was then applied to highlight mortar lines and stone detail. A plastic sheet of shingles painted light brown, was glued to the roof.  It was weathered with washes go green, grey, brown and black.  A total of 68 windows were painted, glassed and installed (actually some were covered over by doors, building extensions or just boarded over).  A brick office from the Delaney Iron Works, with it's bridged hallway was added to one side of the building.  Details were added and weathered.

The Name Game

I personally find it difficult, to not only name my layout but also the towns on it.  If you are modeling an existing line or location, problem solved.  With the Woodstock layout,we are at that spot.  We have a layout, no name, we have seven towns, and a branch line, no names.  There are several ways to approach this. You can name the towns in alphabetical order (Ames, Brant, Craig, etc.) that way all operators, new and old, would know what town is next and in what direction. You could name them after club members (I see all kind of problems with that, Owen and Fox would work, but Hietown and Brinkerville, don't cut it). You could name them for something unique about the town, Port, for the port, Stockton, for the town with the stock yard, Junction, for the town with a junction, oops we have two). Elsewhere for staging because if the car is not on the layout, it must be elsewhere.  The  latter gives meaning to the names chosen but lacks the ABC effect, unless we can combine both approaches.  Let's see, starting in Elsewhere (staging) we proceed to Freeport (port) then on to Gulch (the town at the end of the gulch, there's no buildings there yet, so I don't know what else to call it).  Horseshoe Bend (this is where the mainline makes a 360 degree turn and has a stock (horse/cattle) pen). Well anyway, stay tuned for more from the name game

Skewed Perception

Model railroaders have a different view of things around us.  Some people see a ball point pen cap, we see an exhaust fan, a fancy toothpick is really a concrete fence baluster, reusable straws are steal chimneys, markers are vertical oil tanks, beads are lightning rods, pill bottles are good part containers, scenery spreaders, umm......