Another Boxcar Ready

I managed to get a little bit done tonight. My competition pieces for Genghis Con are ready for primer now. One of them gave me a bit of trouble tonight, but a little green stuff went along way tonight. Since they are competition pieces though I won't be putting them up on the blog just yet. The Marines are also ready to be primed as they will be my "let's relax" stuff. What I really got done was another freight car for the railroad. Again I think I'm going to go back and add some more weathering, it just feels like to light a hand again. Maybe once I get track up and running and a structure or two I'll feel better about how they look.

Track Laying has Begun!

Part of the whole reason for this blog was to try and keep up with my model railroading which had definitely been the poor cousin lately. Well tonight I finished laying the track on one half of the layout. The pictures are awful but at least I accomplished something and the freight cars are rolling through their paces just fine. Maybe tomorrow I'll actually run one of the CF7s!

The Patch layout design, ATSF

I think my layout design has pretty much reached its final form. The design itself is taken straight from the prototype location in Los Angeles and features the railroad alley between 7th Street and Industrial Street between Alameda and Mateo.  The focal point to this area for me is the curved entrance between two brick buildings (that dates back to at least the 1920s). This features a three way turnout in the middle of Mill Street. This area is known as the warehouse district to the natives and the Patch to the AT&SF crews that switched freight cars in and out of the area. My version is set in the mid 70s, during this time it was definitely on the decline as far as rail served industries were concerned. In my world it gets to be as busy as I want it to be. Many of the original structures are still present in the area although a number of them, like Nabisco, have been turned into loft style apartments. Here is the trackplan that I developed:

Model Railroads

I have two model railroads that occupy my time, although I admit that model railroading has become the secondary hobby for me.  The oldest railroad both by date and concept is my version of the Colorado and Northwestern (C&N), a narrow-gauge railroad that ran from Boulder, Colorado to both Eldora and Ward CO. It was known as both the Switzerland Trail of America and the whiplash route. My own version is actually standard gauge rather than narrow gauge as I discovered that my favorite parts of the hobby did not involve building freight cars from scratch or from kits. The setting for the railroad is Gold Hill CO on the line between Boulder and Ward set in about 1904. My newest railroad is the AT&SFand moves us much farther forward in time to 1975 or so and is set in the warehouse district of Los Angeles, more specifically an area known as the "Patch". Keith Jordan's model work and Robert Smaus' pictures captured my imagination and so my version of the patch is coming into being this year. I'm hoping to start laying track and building structures in the next few weeks.

This is an archive photo I think I pulled from the Los Angeles City Library. The large building in the center is the Walnut Exchange building. The building with the pyramid shaped skylights is Phillips Poultry and across the street from Phillips Poultry is the area where the track curves in between the two brick buildings. The Nabisco building would be in the direction of the bottom right of the photo. In this photo a steam engine is between the curved walled buildings.The main area that I'm modeling runs parallel to 7th Street between the Walnut Exchange and Phillips Poultry. The entire area is known as the Patch and there is a lot of it that you can't see in this photo. The street in front is 7th Street and the cross street is Mill Street. The other street running parallel to 7th Street is Industrial Street.