G503 Military Vehicle Message Forums

I got a aluminum casting of a 1943 Baldwin builder's plate (for a VO diesel, but it's mostly the same type of plate they also used for their export steam locomotives) off eBay recently, and I decided to paint the thing with gold paint (nobody makes bronze colored spray paint that I could find), then went over it with brass paint highlights, then filled in the black background and generally made it look well-worn. My goal was to give it the best, "just yanked off the locomotive in the scrap line and never cleaned" look that I could. Now it hangs over the back wall over the layout.

I love this shot...



I'm going to re-shoot this in RAW format for the upcoming magazine article (more info that later), but at a slightly different angle (so you can see the freight cars behind the locomotive) but using the same real-time techniques to show steam and exhaust in action. No Photoshop was used for the steam effects. The exhaust and steam were done with added up paper towels and a cardboard tube covered in cotton and painted. They were each moved around in a 30-second exposure, then removed halfway through.

Your technique worked very well.

Just got a new cell phone last night (a LG G5) and it's got a really good camera. First photo I took was of the layout and I was surprised at the depth of field for a cell phone:


These shots gave me some ideas for angles I'd never thought of before.
I'm working on a magazine article on my layout and I'll be re-shooting these shots with my good SLR with long exposure in RAW format. I hope to get all/most of that done this coming weekend between the holiday and everything my wife has planned.

I just added what the old folks would have called, "a mess o' Critters" on the layout. And this isn't all of them.

I drew out a track plan in ink, then scanned and colored it last night. I think it turned out okay. The original file is the size of a letter-sized sheet of paper:

Within a 2-week period, I've found that my layout will be in TWO model train publications this year.
I have confirmed my layout will be in the On30 Annual for 2017! It's the "Tweetsie Inspired" layout mentioned in the pre-order form: https://shop.whiteriverproductions.com/products/on17
Also, the online Model Railroad Hobbyist magazine will be running one of my photos of the layout in an upcoming issue: http://model-railroad-hobbyist.com/

I added a Plexi piece at the edge of the turntable, to keep my locomotives from doing half-gainers to the floor. The Plexi was cut, drilled, and the mounts pre drilled and ready to go for quite a while. I just waited to mount them in place until after I took the other photos for my upcoming magazine article.

And today, I just scored this off eBay, a timetable from the RR I model in the same year. There are not many of these still around!

I uploaded these videos:
https://youtu.be/tBt3DHPuD_k
https://youtu.be/eEyGruZ-fXE

I couldn't sleep, so I put down some static grass mats on the layout last night. They're pre-made by Heiki in Germany and look like real high grass with very easy application.

I made a big order to Scenic Express, and it arrived a few days ago. I now have three rabbits running free on the layout, and finally a scarecrow for my cornfield. I also bought several sheets of static grass mats, two of which went in place on the layout that night because I couldn't sleep, and the rest were put on the layout the following evening.

Online magazine Model RR Hobbyist just ran a photo from my layout it it's current issue, which can be seen here: http://mrhpub.com/2017-03-mar/online/html5/?page=164

I got this reproduction 1939 poster yesterday in the mail from the Avery County Museum in NC. It dropped right into the Wal-Mart frame I bought this morning with ease, and it was up on the wall in a few minutes. Note the certificate to the lower right, that's an original stock certificate from the Linville River, a ET&WNC subsidiary.

The operating session this past weekend went well. Only two people signed on for it, and in the space of an hour on the day of the session, each one wanted to bring at least one other person with them. So, I went from two to five within an hour. That didn’t turn out to be the case, as two of them dropped out before they would have come over. So I had three people, all of whom had seen the layout before. One of the guys was the one who wired my layout for DCC and he’d not seen the scenery before. His first comment was, “Wow, it’s really green,” to which I replied, “Yep, so is the Blue Ridge in summertime”. We ran one entire train and I re-set the layout by changing some cars and waybills on the car cards. While I did that, they watched my DVD of the ET&WNC color film from the 40s. They actually wanted to watch it to the end and they had plenty of questions about where things were and how operations worked for the real railroad. Thankfully, I was able to answer most of them, having done so much research in the ET over the years.

By the time they returned to the second train, the same guy said, “Yep, I get why it’s so green, now.” I heard later that they all had a good time.
I want to run another session soon, and hopefully get someone people who’ve never seen the layout before.
The funny part was Charlie (my 15-year-old dachshund) kept walking into the room, looking up. I really think he wanted to see what the focus of attention was on, and when I picked him up, he was watching the trains. All these years, I’ve had a train fan pup, it seems!

I finished the Studebaker US6 today. This is a very hard to find 1/43 scale diecast by Atlas (its the only one I've ever found for sale by a US vendor) and came out of the box as a British-marked one. I had to disassemble it, repaint and put new decals to make it look like a US mid-war stateside truck.

Maybe someday, the same company will make a GMC one in 1/43.