Cartoon Wednesday

 

Mount Blue Model Co - On30 22' Boxcar

I have been doing a lot of fanciful doodling with railroad plans roughly based on space, potentially, available in the family room. I found that I was suffering from some fairly serious grandiose designs. So I added a couple of parameters to make things actually fit in the space available. 

It has to be portable, best case I should be able to put it up, take it down and move it on my own. I decided I would use a 36"x 80". This means that my widest curve radius can only be 16" which is pretty darn tight. I know that all my On30 engines can be modified to run this tight a curve, although the 2-8-0s might look a little odd. All my current equipment is either 30' (freight cars) or 40' (passenger cars). I'm not sure how those are going to look on this sharp curve so I went looking for some of the shorter kits out there. Mount Blue Model Co has a nice boxcar kit that's 22' long so I ordered two to build and have them ready when I start to do some tests with the curvature.

I haven't built a freight car kit in years and this laser kit is very different from what I'm use to. It practically falls together and has more detail that those older kits I used to build.

 

The Roger Malinowski Tribute Part 3 - The Market Finished Finally

2025 has not been the greatest year for us. Dealing with the estate of a loved once can be grueling especially one as complicated as my Mom's. I found this particular kit to be a difficult build, the thin plywood didn't leave a lot of surface area for glue and a number of the sub structures were a bit fragile until assembled. I made the two roofs removable, this will definitely be a foreground building and with those large windows will need some serious interior detailing. I finished the inside walls and floors from textures I bought from Clever Models.

I have only lightly weathered the building at this point, more weathering will happen when it actually gets installed on the layout. As with the other buildings the base is only temporary at this point. I have no idea how these will fit into the scene yet so I at least wanted a finished base to protect the model until it gets to the layout.

There were a lot of mistakes made on this build, some of which were pretty basic and I became quite frustrated with it. At least once I considered just junking the whole kit and seeing if I could find another one out there. In addition there were a couple of missing frames which included the corbels from the front ( I have some on order but they haven't arrived yet) and the base for the front porch. I also managed to install some clapboard upside down and fogged windows with the CA. I would like to build it again, but Stoney Creek kits are a bit on the rare side.

Once again, I 'm using my 28mm Prospector from Reaper Miniatures to provide a little sense of scale.

Cartoon Wednesday

 

The Roger Malinowski Tribute Part 2 - The Boot Shop - Finished

I realized that I never showed off the finished pictures of the Boot Shop. Now a guided tour lead by your favorite prospector: