Sunday, February 21, 2010

the layout effect

Once in a while something happens. Something that comes at you so totally out of the blue that just blows you away. Wingetts recycling has already done that to me once with Jeremiah and Brandon at the Princeton Train show and yesterday it happened again.
I was presenting the first of a series of workshops on designing and building a small model railroad at the Princeton Model Train Club. The first session was well attended and I think I captured a few peoples imagination.
One person in particular. We shall call him Tim (for I think that was his name, sometimes I'm so bad remembering names). He had bought has father along to attend the workshop. He wasn't really all that interested in Model Railroads. But then he took a look at Wingetts and pulled up a chair and started to take a very serious interest in the model. It turned out that he works at Phillips Recycling! He recognised the building and the piles of wheels. He was very impressed with the model the atmosphere was exactly right. The only thing that he could see missing was some holes in the sheet metal walls of the building.
I did glean some interesting tidbits about the real thing. For example you will have seen in some of my pictures of Phillips that the piles of wheels have white and blue patches painted on the end of the axles. I often wondered why this was. It turns out that this was to identify different size and weight of wheels for when they are sold on.
Once again, I was blown away that this little model, that I knocked up in less than a week could interest someone so much.

Thursday, February 11, 2010

More T please

Is the name of my blog covering my activities in T scale the worlds smallest model railroading scale. You should pop over there to see some inspirational examples of work that T scalers produce. I'm all fired up to work in T again.

Friday, February 5, 2010

Another layout, another blog

As you may well be aware if you have been following this blog I am to be presenting a series of small layout workshops at the Princeton Model Train Club in the forthcoming weeks. I was planning to use the layout featured in my protocrastinator blog as the example for the workshop students to follow along with. Well. I had a rethink and I thought that it might be a bit big and involved for that purpose. As a result I have started to develop a new idea. A much smaller layout that will be much easier to build and complete in the alotted time set out by the workshop classes. As you may well know all my layouts have a blog and this new one will be no exception. You'll be able to follow it at Cwm Lwch. There you go, another layout, another blog. I'm a troubled soul I really am...

Wednesday, February 3, 2010

Saved!

So here you go. After a little bit of cutting, filing and filling I'm just about ready to nip over to a hobby shop and get some grey, black and yellow paints for this project. Though I might try to find some yellow striping instead of paint, as yellow paint is notoriously lacking in its coverage powers.
To be honest I'm really pleased with how it's shaping up. I never expected to be doing a kitbash/conversion like this. So expectations weren't that high. But I think I'm doing OK. Paint will tell.

Monday, February 1, 2010

Welcome new visitors!

Hello there!
Wingett's recycling has just appeared in this months edition of Carl Arendts small layout scrapbook. (Thanks Carl)
To those of you dropping in for the first time. A big hello to you all.
Those 7 (well 5 actually) days that were taken to build the layout seem so long ago now. But the layout still serves me well. In fact for those of you resident in Minnesota Wingetts will be at the Granite City Train show in Saint Cloud, MN in April if you want to come along and take a look.
So all you new visitors you might want to pull up a comfy seat and a glass of your favourite tipple and read the entire story that starts back in September of 2009...