Sunday Scenic Showcase July 14,2024

Working on my next building……a River Leaf Models project…….weathering the “concrete color” walls…..

Continuing the fire escape subassemblies on my previous building……it’s slow going. Outdoor painting was stopped by 3 days of rain…..

Have a great week, everyone!

Peter

I have been working on this drive-in movie scene on and off for ~2 years. Yes the screen works, I use it to watch TV sometimes!

I enjoyed the scenics this morning @Alan Graziano , @Putnam Division, an @Rollsington

This Week I have been working on this Ameri-town Marty’s Auto Parts store. I have not decided on which Auto Parts store name from Olive Hill as yet for this building , Either Erwin & Kiser’s or Rayburn’s.  Each had a thriving business and wonderful reputation in the county.

The drive-in in Olive Hill was named after a chiropractor in town named Day who opened the business just as I was about twelve. The name was Doc Day’s Pleasant Valley Drive-In. It was an exciting Saturday night when the family took in a movie.  A wonderful scenic  addition to a layout.

Have a great week guys!

Forgive me if I have posted this in the past. If so, charge it off to an old buzzard whose memory is not as sharp as it used to be.

Below is a small REA freight building that I scratch-built for a club in which I was formerly a member, The Red Lion, PA Model Railroaders.

Lately I have been trying to resin print some utility and lineside poles with some success. The lineside poles are a copy of some alley and H fixture poles I’ve made in the past with the excellent and currently unavailable Weaver poles. I found a free .stl file on the internet for a Hemingray #42 and found that it scales out quite nicely compared to Weaver’s (and the real deal) when rescaled to 1/4” to the foot. (The utility pole insulators are my own freelanced design). Making these in resin keeps me from chopping up many Weaver crossarms. These are designed to plug into Evergreen 7/32” styrene tube. These were all designed in Tinkercad.

Norm,

Norm the utility poles on your layout are one of those details that I have always thought made your railroad stand out. I imagined that you would take them to the next level with 3D printing. It looks like you have a great start in those efforts. I hope that you will have a video for us.

Dave

@Norm Charbonneau posted:

Lately I have been trying to resin print some utility and lineside poles with some success. The lineside poles are a copy of some alley and H fixture poles I’ve made in the past with the excellent and currently unavailable Weaver poles. I found a free .stl file on the internet for a Hemingray #42 and found that it scales out quite nicely compared to Weaver’s (and the real deal) when rescaled to 1/4” to the foot. (The utility pole insulators are my own freelanced design). Making these in resin keeps me from chopping up many Weaver crossarms. These are designed to plug into Evergreen 7/32” styrene tube. These were all designed in Tinkercad.

As always, your attention to detail is second to none.  I suspect that for you it would be more of a nuisance then a positive but it would be amazing if you made some of the more ubiquitous detail items available for purchase on terms that work for you.  I'm not familiar with 3d printing but hope to get into it at some point.  I would like to try to produce some of the detail parts that you do to create that level of detail that sets a layout apart.  Alternatively to selling, are the files to produce this type of items interchangeable with different types of 3D printers?

Improvements to the intermodal yard continue, albeit slowly.  Every where I look is another project and when it comes to these projects I do not have the singular focus that most of you do so I'm all over the place and some projects once started languish for a longtime before getting completed.  But here's this weeks contribution.  A railroad crossing was needed to access the transfer facility.

I started out with these Lionel grade crossings.  Laying the track in the grooves raised the track over an 1/8".  Doesn't sound like a lot but it is so I sliced two into four individual pieces.

I got lucky.  I never thought that I may need that 1/8" for the pick up rollers to make contact with the center rail until after I cut them but it worked out.  Placing all eight pieces  left me with two distinct crossings with a space fir the track tie in the middle which I apparently failed to take a picture of.  Suffice to say it was unacceptable so a third crossing was was altered to bridge the gaps.

Like the first two it was cut into four pieces.  Then the sides were removed to yield flat pieces to bridge the gaps in the ramps.  Scraps from the connecting webs were used to bridge the gaps between side and center rails.

Now I need to find my crossing gates and maybe some yellow pavement stripes.

Thank you all for the Likes on this simple project.