Suzanna and I have started our South American trip. We landed in Buenos Aires on our 38th anniversary and we had a great day. The people from Delta and Holland America took great care of us. we met Father Bob from Cleveland in line boarding the ship and he found out about our anniversary. Father…
I recently received an Ultimaker 3 Extended 3D printer. My plan is to print unique buildings and accessories for my Garden Model Railroad. I have all of my children and son in laws that can 3D program to help modify or create structures that I can print. We still have a long way to go…
It is finally coming together. Over the past 6 weeks we have installed a landscape retaining wall around the raised portion of the track and then filled in to the track level with gravel and dirt. The track now looks a part of the landscape with easy access from the edges. There was a…
The fun about building trains is that you can learn so much from everyone else. I recently had the opportunity to goto Germany to visit my daughter and son-in-law and we took a side trip to Hamburg to visit a massive model train layout. The place is called is Miniatur Wunderland. http://www.miniatur-wunderland.com It is located…
Well it had to happen but did have to happen 2 weeks before my grandson’s 5th birthday? On 7/2/17 we had a large electrical storm and lightening struck my next door neighbors yard. He lost TVs and other components. My house electrical was protected by my whole house surge protector but any networked component got…
Oringally building the g-scale drawbrige was planned for much later in the project as I knew this would be complicated and would have to be built from scratch. No vendors that I found offer a drawbrige. But working on the layout, the bridge was in a main path and during the work on the mountains,…
One of the key design features for the model railroad layout is a waterfall and river. It just adds a lot of activity and interest in the layout. I added a concrete spillway before starting the layout to handle the water coming down from the driveway. The spillway ends with a drain line into the…
Well the mountains are finished. We had a big weekend with Tony, Chele, Dominic, and Kelly to spray mortar on the mountain. We used a sparying tool from https://www.mortarsprayer.com to spray mortar on the mountain. All of the mountains had been covered with chicken wire and mortar soaked sheets. The mortar had dried and now we…
I finally finished all of the track laying, track wiring, and turnout controls. I still need to finish wiring my signals, dwarf lights, and end stop lights but I decided to start on my mountains over the holidays. I planned on building a wood structure to support the shell, cover it with chicken wire, cover…
I have been spending a lot of time with the grandchildren on the model railroads but they always ask about the big trains. “Papa we saw big train today and it was very interesting”. So I found a place in Bryson City, NC that is a scenic railroad ride. They had just added a steam…
