The last time I touched the Marshall Canning building on my M&StL Ackley, Iowa layout it looked like this. As of today the model is about 99% complete. Here’s what I was able to get done in the last couple of weeks. Adding Mortar With the model painted I wanted to try adding mortar between the bricks. I used the industry standard, Roberts Brick Formula, seen below, for the job. I never used this stuff before but it was quick and easy and I highly, highly recommend it. I followed the instructions exactly and brushed the stuff on with a … Continue reading No. 60: Modeling the Marshall Canning Company of Ackley, Iowa, Part 1

Last Friday my wife dragged me out to the “Technikmuseum Sinsheim” (in English, the Technical Museum at Sinsheim, Germany).  My wife was excited to take my son and me there but honestly I expected another slow day at another museum. It turned out I was very, very wrong.  It was like going to the German version of the Smithsonian Air & Space Museum.  It was fantastic. The museum was full of tanks and military vehicles of all types, along with an entire warehouse full of cars and motorcycles and F1 cars, plus a warehouse of tractors, airplanes, bikes, ship engines, … Continue reading No. 59: Ackley Depot Scenery, Part 0

Around the time I went to St. Louis last month for St. Louis RPM, I made a lot of progress on a bunch of small things.  On the south side module I painted track and ties, did some ballasting, put down some dirt to prep for scenery, and finished the fascia behind the workbench.  Here are a few progress photos. Painting Track I had a lot of unpainted track on the end of the south-side module and I painted all the track and got it ready for ballasting.  I used the same paint I always used for track–Testors Rubber.  The … Continue reading No. 58: South Side Scenery (Ackley Layout)

We drove to Strasbourg, France over the weekend and it was a really beautiful city.  It’s France, so there were plenty of peddlers, con-men and homeless people about, but in general the city was surprisingly nice and it has a large post-medieval-era center that is beautifully restored.  Outdoor restaurants were everywhere.  We enjoyed our day shopping and seeing the sights.  Here’s me and The Boss in “Petite France” on the island downtown in Strasbourg. The Catholic cathedral downtown is spectacular.  A sign outside said it took 400 years to complete.  Being a layout builder, naturally the first thing out of … Continue reading No. 57: Repairing Scenery on the Ackley Layout

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