The day before I left Germany for St. Louis RPM I drove south about 45 minutes and went to the West Wall Museum in Pirmasens, Germany.  The West Wall was Germany’s post-WWI reply to the Maginot Line, and it was vast and extensive.  The museum is essentially the only remaining tunnel system from the West Wall (most of it was demolished after the war) and it includes all kinds of memorabilia and equipment, and a large number of vehicles, and a lot of outstanding 1-to-35 scale models of the former facilities. Here are a couple of pictures if you’re interested.  This 1-35th model … Continue reading No. 55: Lighting the Ackley Layout

So my wife called me at work this morning and announced “We are now on the Information B Highway!”  We finally had our horrible satellite internet replaced this morning with a hybrid DSL-LTE thing that delivers faster internet service.  It’s not the 100 megabytes/sec I had in Illinois–this is probably more like 20, which is why she said we’re on the B Highway (a reference to German B highways, that are not-quite-the-Autobahn). Despite what you know about Germany, it is one of the lowest-rated countries in Europe when it comes to internet connectivity.  In some places the internet is good; in … Continue reading No. 52: Ackley Layout Details

In an effort to keep vandals out of the Standard Oil yard on my HO scale layout, I went shopping for chain link fence.  There’s no evidence there was ever a fence around the real site,  but chain link fence has been around for over 100 years—and it became common in the U.S. in the years following World War II—so I felt a chain link fence would be appropriate for my layout which is fixed in the summer of 1950. Here’s the real place around 1968–this is about the best photo I’ve got: A friend on the Proto-Layouts list recommended a product made by Alkem … Continue reading No. 51: Fencing for Standard Oil (Ackley Layout)

Over the last ten days I completed the tedious task of completing assembly of the large Marshall Canning structure. When we last saw the cannery, it looked like this: A little background might explain the madness below.  My model of the Marshall Canning Co. on my previous layout, shown below, was built cheaply without much supporting structure behind the building façade. It was flimsy and I couldn’t move it without breaking a seam or two.  The roof had no support and had numerous “waves”. On the new model I wanted to built interior support using a product called GatorFoam to make the whole building … Continue reading No. 50: Modeling the Marshall Canning Company of Ackley, Iowa

While I was waiting for a shipment of parts to show up from the US, I decided to get started on what I call “the farmer’s field” which is a foreground scene on my layout. The farmer’s field area is about nine inches deep by 30 inches long.  The real field has probably been a corn field since the 1930s but I am not going to put down a couple of square feet of HO scale corn, thank you. Below.  The farmer’s field, ready for planting.  That’s Marshall Canning in the back. Instead of corn I chose to plant beans … Continue reading No. 48: The Farmer’s Field at Ackley, Iowa

In Part 1 I discussed the old Ackley layout and how the Marshall Canning Company plant was planned and operated. Here in Part 2 I’ll cover progress on the canning plant for the new layout, along with operational considerations. Meanwhile…Doug Harding sent along a wonderful photo of the plant from the mid-1930s (see below). There are a lot of interesting revelations in the photo. First, this is a pre-WWII photo and despite my research it is obvious that a large addition has been added between the plant and the long husking shed behind the building. Second, there is a sign on the … Continue reading No. 47: The Marshall Canning Company of Ackley, Iowa, Part 2