250th Post! Video on my batch weathering method

My 250th post on July 4th.  Pretty cool.   Here's a video on how I weather several cars at one time.
Happy 241st birthday America!  Hope everyone has a great and safe 4th of July!

Newest Video is out and it includes a Giveaway!

Just recently I received 1100 subscribers to my You Tube channel.  To celebrate, I decided to do a giveaway for a VMID hopper.  Check out the video for your chance to win.  May sure you watch the entire video for all the details about the giveaway!

Happy 4th!

June 2017 Crossties featuring myself

This is the June 2017 edition of Crossties.  This is the publication done my local division of the NMRA: James River Division in the Mid Eastern Region.  This particular edition has a pic of me doing my presentation back in May:
2017 June Crossties

Besides featuring me, it's a well done and well put together publication and it comes out every even month.

Enjoy!

Summer modeling has begun!

Had some time this past week to get some modeling done.  Nothing on the layout but some side-jobs like locomotive painting, decoder installs and running some trains.  My oldest son, Cameron has really took an interest in trains this last few weeks and he's been wanting to go into the train room more than me!  This has came out of nowhere!  So, since I was at the train show last weekend, I decided to get him a locomotive.  I did this because he passed all of his SOL tests this year on the first try.  He really likes Amtrak, so he decided he wanted a P42 locomotive.  I could not get him to settle on the F40 that would have been time wise correct for my layout.  If you know anything about the Kato P42's, they are not DCC ready and required some work to install a decoder.

Kato P42 #66 in special paint

The board has a few changes to be made.  All per Kato's reference guide

Kato is so far a head of their time.  The motors and flywheels on each truck saves room for decoders in the middle of the locomotive.

 Besides working on some custom weathering for a client, I also finally got some details and paint on Virginia Central's newest loco, a GP7.

VC #107 with all the details added.  With freelancing, you can add whatever details you want.

Yellow paint like the RS36 #106.  Can't wait to dirty it up!

Great Scale Model Train Show next weekend and a crazy week!

Just wanted to remind everyone in the Mid-Atlantic area about the Great Scale Model Train Show this coming weekend June 17th & 18th in Timonium, MD (north of Baltimore) . Hours are 9-5 Saturday and 10-4 on Sunday.  This is the smaller of the 4 shows held in the smaller building instead of the Cow Palace.  We still pack about 300 tables in.  It's held at the Maryland State Fairgrounds.  All the info is right here:
The Great Scale Model Train Show

On to the rest of the week.  Wow, this past week has been extremely busy.  Seven baseball games in 6 days is crazy, but that what we were faced with this past week.  Lots of rain outs will cause this and with 2 boys on separate teams, you get the hint.  Throw on top of it yard work and graduation and you have a complete week! I spent most of yesterday re-cooperating from the week.  I did get to run some trains last night, as I had not done this in a while. Even had my oldest son Cam (11)  running some trains with me.  He hadn't done this in a while!  Testing out trains running from staging and meeting at Parker.  Seems like the railroad is going to run as I planned out.  Still have a few feeders to install but in all, it ran well.  Next week looks like it is less busy, and it's the last week of work so there is some modeling railroading in my future!

Latest update video is out!

Neat little railroad that would make an awesome model railroad

Railroads like the Virginia Blue Ridge Railroad is a little known short line that ran between Lynchburg and Charlottesville, VA.  Most who knew anything about it was that they ran steam locomotives into the early 1960's!  So they were a popular railroad then. I've always like their green and black SW1's.  The short line ran to various industries and interchanged with the Southern Railroad at Tye River.  During this rainy week, I think back to the one of the worst natural disasters in the the state of Virginia.  In August of 1969, the remnants of one of the most powerful hurricanes in US history, Hurricane Camille parked over Nelson County Virginia.  During that night, a world record 27 inches of rain fell in 3-5 hours; 5 inches in a half hour!  The devastation was unreal as you could imagine.  Thankfully the Southern Crescent did not leave Charlottesville that evening because of a washout south of town.  Little did they know the real carnage that laid ahead.

Here are some pics of railroad damage: (Garland Harper pics)
Hurricane Camille damage

Great article on the the Virginia Blue Ridge Railroad:
History of the VBR railroad

A model of the VBR SW1 #10