Model Trains – Not Your Average Engineer

December 23, 2021December 30, 2021

2021 Christmas train at Forked Meadow

This year we only brought out the N scale train to run around the top of a table. It was still fun having a train out for Christmas. Nothing like the old days of 20+ trains running at the same time though.

May 24, 2020December 12, 2021

Building a trestle in N scale for a future Nn3 layout

After last week’s adventures in building a cabin, I decided to build a railroad trestle in N scale suitable for a Nn3 train at some point in the future. It came out pretty good all things considered.

This is a three part trestle with some standard single height trestle bents (scale 15 feet tall) and a bridging section that might be found spanning a chasm.

When installed on a model railroad layout, there would be some earthwork for the single span bridge at both ends and also some abutments at either end of the trestle. But for now in the absence of a layout to put this on, here is the current product.

A few in-progress photos to show how I laid up each bent of the regular trestle sections. Then some construction photos of how I did the single span bridge in the middle.

This trestle was constructed based loosely on a bunch of different trestles that I found photos of online. The photos I’ve seen are mainly of big, impressive trestles. It is harder to find photos of smaller trestles like this would have been. The smaller, regular and very average trestles weren’t noteworthy enough back in the day to waste much film on.

I’m not sure what i’ll build next out of twigs from the yard. I am starting to run out of straight twigs that are the right size for building things. I might have to go further afield to find new construction materials.

May 17, 2020December 12, 2021

Building an N scale log cabin from scratch using twigs

I decided to try my hand at building a little 15×20 scale foot log cabin in N scale out of some twigs that I found in the yard. With the current global situation, rather than going to one of the local chain craft shops, I figured I’d try and scavenge materials. Aside from one chunk of tooth pick to make the chimney, the entire log cabin is made out of twigs from the yard and some Elmer’s wood glue.

All done. Door, chimney, shake roof, and log cabin sitting on some big sill logs.

I wouldn’t necessarily want to spent more than a few days in this cabin. It would be a wee bit drafty. But overall it’s a very passable little N scale model.

Here are some early in progress photos. It feels a bit like I’m building a real log cabin except with an x-acto knife instead of an axe and hatchet.

I built this over two days using about seven or eight hours total while watching model train YouTube videos in the background.

In progress photos of putting the roof together. I ended up making shingles out of the twigs from my yard because that’s what I had on hand.

Let me tell you… making individual shingles is hard work. But the effect is great. Looks pretty prototypical from photos I found online of old miners cabins. Some of them used big slabs of wood as shingles because that’s what they could get. My shingles are about one scale foot wide on average.

Some detail of the roof line and chimney. It would have been useful to have thinner shakes for finishing the roof but I did what I could do with what I had.

Here are a couple finished shots with a dime for scale. I think this is a very passable crude log cabin that you might see in a mining district 100-150 years ago somewhere in the American west or up into Canada.

All in all, I think the little modeling experiment turned out pretty well. It’s pretty fun to build something like this from scratch just based on the materials I have on hand around the house or out in the yard. Now i have to think about what I might make next. I was considering a simple tipple or similar. However, I don’t have dimensional bass or balsa wood so that would be a bit of a challenge. Maybe I could start working on a little diorama to put this cabin into and eventually install on a Nn3 (narrow gauge N scale) model train layout?