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Model Railroading: The Ultimate Guide (2019) March 31st, 2020 Digital Back Issue Cover

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The Model Railroader Video Plus team is pleased to bring you The Ultimate Guide 2019! For those of you who’ve just picked up this magazine for the first time, you’re probably wondering what it’s all about. Well, every year we create more than 150 videos for ModelRailroaderVideoPlus.com, our subscription video website, and we cover a lot of ground in those 52 weeks. We always have one or more project railroads running to show layout-building techniques. We also have a team of contributing modelers who willingly share their best tips. And we take trips to showcase great layouts and full-sized railroads. There’s always something exciting to watch on MRVideoPlus.com! Although watching videos is a great way to learn how to do some things (I fixed my stove by watching a YouTube video), sometimes…

2019 Cast of characters

David Popp Producer JOB: Paints big pictures (and small models) FAVE: MINI Coopers FACT: Once directed “South Pacific” and used real sand on the stage! Kent Johnson Associate Producer JOB: New editor for “Garden Railways” magazine – congrats! FAVE: His big dog, Mack FACT: Has travelled by train in the former USSR Ray and Renee Grosser Awesome Layout Owners JOB: Provider for full-time wife FAVE: Building really big models FACT: Has parachute jumped out of aircraft 193 times JOB: Full-time wife FAVE: Wears flip-flops all year FACT: Has scratchbuilt more than 150 models, working from Z to O scale Ben Lake Associate Editor JOB: Plug stuff together and make it work FAVE: Seven Wonders board game FACT: Grew up with a BN main line in the backyard Jenny Freeland Assistant Editor JOB: Keeping MRVP running FAVE: Jamaica! FACT: Can deadlift 155 pounds Cody Grivno Group Technical Editor Job: Cody’s Workshop Fave: Happy Joe’s taco pizza Fact:…

2019 Cast of characters

Model a 1950s Suburban service train

Model Railroader Video Plus producer David Popp designed a track plan based on the Chicago & North Western in Crystal Lake, Ill. A natural companion project was to model a 1950s-era suburban service (commuter) train in HO scale. One type of unit used on the full-size trains was an Electro-Motive Division GP7. Fortunately, we had an Athearn Genesis HO scale model in North Western colors, complete with steam-generator equipment and head-end power cabinets. But now we needed cars to put behind our four-axle unit. David and I talked about different options for cars. Then I remembered Rivarossi’s line of 60-foot heavyweights. The cars are based on C&NW prototypes. Better yet, we knew the company offered cars decorated for C&NW. That is, except when we needed them. Various searches for used cars came up…

Model a 1950s Suburban service train

Lake of Plexiglas

Water features are always star attractions on model railroads. Our Canadian Canyons N scale project, featured on MRVideoPlus.com, has two rivers and a lake on it. I’d used two-part resin to make the rivers, but the lake was something of a special problem – it had to span two sections of the layout that needed to be separated. Resin wasn’t going to work well here. Enter Plexiglas, a brand of clear acrylic panels. I’ve used this transparent material before to represent water surfaces, and I thought it might be an ideal starting point for our Kamloops Lake project. THE PROTOTYPE David Says… As long as you can make straight cuts, acrylic panels are very easy to work with. A metal straightedge helps a lot. I’ve also used metal paint cans as a guide to…

Lake of Plexiglas

Make a FAST FOREST

When the MRVP team set to work on building our N scale Canadian Canyons, I signed up to work on my favorite part – scenery. The layout models the Thompson and Fraser River Valleys in British Columbia. These are heavily forested regions, so it was clear that I was going to need a lot of trees! Making trees Step 1: Soak trees in water For this project, I used several Timberline Scenery Grow-a-tree lodgepole pine tree kits. The tree armatures come flattened in the package, but they take their original tree-shape when placed in water. Step 2: Trim the trees Once the armatures had spread out, I pulled them out of the water and teased the branches to get the trees into their final shape. I trimmed any branches that were too long or out…

Make a FAST FOREST

The Copper Basin Railway

Every prototype railroad has a unique character shaped by three things: Its location, its purpose, and its history. The Copper Basin Railway, located in southern Arizona, is no exception. If you’re interested in modeling passenger service, bridge traffic, or a wide variety of freight trains, the Copper Basin isn’t the prototype for you. But if heavy unit trains grinding through the spectacular landscape of the Sonoran Desert behind lashups of handsome Geeps appeals to you, read on. The Copper Basin Railway is a single-purpose transportation system, designed to move tons of bulk material between an open-pit mine at Ray, Ariz., and a smelter at Hayden in an endless industrial extraction process that yields up to 380 million pounds of 99.44 percent pure copper each year. The railroad, once a Southern Pacific branch line,…

The Copper Basin Railway

A basement-sized Copper mine

Industrial railroading has a charm all its own. While it can involve Class 1 railroads, it usually it comes in the form of a dedicated carrier serving the needs of a major plant system. Such is the case with Arizona’s the Copper Basin Ry. This short line, based in Hayden, Ariz., serves one customer, the ASARCO copper mine and smelter. To fit the ASARCO copper mine at Ray and at least a bit of the smelter at Hayden into the plan, I knew I’d need something bigger than your average 10 x 12-foot spare room. I designed the Copper Basin Ry. plan shown here to fit the layout room of my former basement. That room connected to two others, so one wall was pretty much left open as aisleway. The CBRY is…

A basement-sized Copper mine

Turning spaces into places

There’s no bigger change you can make to a layout than adding scenery where there was bare benchwork. Suddenly a model train running on a board is transformed into a railroad delivering goods from one place to another. Only scenery can change spaces into places on a layout. My current HO scale Bona Vista RR layout had a peninsula that sits directly in front of the staircase that leads into the train room. For visitors coming for a layout tour, the stark L-girder benchwork didn’t make a very good first impression, so I set out to change that. I didn’t want to add a town to this space because there was going to be one on the deck above. I also ruled out an industrial switching area because there’s one immediately to…

Turning spaces into places

PRE-SHADING MADE SIMPLE

Light is a funny thing. It casts subtle shadows that belie that an object is as smooth and uniform as it may appear. Pre-shading mimics that effect by forcing the impression of changes in lighting, and it’s easy to do with an airbrush. 1 - PRIMING The model needs to be overall light for pre-shading to work. Start by priming it with white or light gray. I prefer the latter for most colors because white can make the contrast too stark. I airbrushed Testors Model Master acrylic Dark Gull Gray paint over the boxcar. Don’t forget to paint the doors, floor, and frame as well! 2 - INTO THE SHADOWS I filled the airbrush with Model Master Engine Black and set the pressure at 20 psi. Using a narrow pattern, spray the black along the…

PRE-SHADING MADE SIMPLE

Q&A with Kathy Millatt

If you’re looking for a model railroad scenery guru, Kathy Millatt may be your answer. She’s known for her YouTube tutorials on model railroad scenery and as the host of Let’s Make a Scene on MRVP, where she demonstrates various scenery projects on her HO scale New Haven layout. In this exclusive interview, Kathy talks about her introduction to model railroading, her current project, and her experience as a judge on the television series, The Great Model Railway Challenge. Jenny: How did you get started in the hobby? Kathy: I started, as I suspect most model railroaders do, as a child with my Dad. I had his Hornby Dublo three-rail on a 4 x 8 board. I soon moved on to other things as I grew up, but many years later I…

Q&A with Kathy Millatt

Super-sized SOO LINE

You might say that railroading runs in our blood. My interest in the Soo Line (Minneapolis, St. Paul & Sault Ste. Marie Ry.) stems from growing up in Glenwood, Minn. It was the first division point west of Shoreham Yard in Minneapolis in the 1940s and ’50s. My dad was a brakeman on the Soo, and had the opportunity to ride the train with him a number of times. Renee’s interest in railroads comes from growing up in Waite Park, Minn. Her father and four generations of her family, including several brothers, worked for the Great Northern Ry. at the car shops. I also worked as a machinist for the GN in the Waite Park shops from 1968 to 1970, so we both have family railroad connections. Big to bigger For a number of…

Super-sized SOO LINE

Full-contact scratchbuilding

As shown here, some of my favorite scratchbuilt cars include a 1929 PS (Pullman-Standard) sawtooth boxcar, a Soo Line 1907 caboose, a standard Soo Line stockcar, and the Russell plow. In many ways, scratchbuilding in this scale is a lot like making smaller models. The main difference is that the tools you use are larger and the parts weigh considerably more. I’ve included a few construction notes for each project to give you an idea as to what is involved. 1929 PS sawtooth boxcar. For this car’s outside bracing, I used 20-gauge steel Z channels I had custom made for me on a CNC bending brake at a local shop. The car also has a 1" x 2" x ⅛" steel center frame to mount the trucks and couplers. I added…

Full-contact scratchbuilding

TRACKSIDE DREW’S ADVENTURE

The Show Me State. Missouri, like railroading, runs in my blood. Many of my ancestors worked for the Milwaukee Road out of Chillicothe, a small town just over an hour’s drive from Kansas City, Mo. My grandparents, both born there, met and married then climbed aboard Milwaukee Road’s Southwest Limited and moved to Milwaukee, Wis. It was there, two decades later, my mother was born, setting the stage for my arrival around the time the Milwaukee ended. All these years later and Missouri still beckons. So, when it came time to plan our 2019 Drew’s Trackside Adventures series, I immediately thought of the beautiful state less than a day’s train ride away. My producer, Kent Johnson, and film crew, Charlie Conway and Allan Dahncke, came along to capture the journey. Join us…

TRACKSIDE DREW’S ADVENTURE

Scratchbuild a sawmill

For the past four years, I’ve wanted to build a sawmill for our Olympia On30 logging railroad, but I was always stuck on how to do it. So after working on everything else I could, it finally came down to just needing the mill. Along the way, I’d purchased a KMP Models sawmill kit. It’s a great little model, but its L-shaped footprint wasn’t going to work for the roughly 6" x 19" space I had available. I also wasn’t quite sure how a sawmill worked, and if I was going to do the project right, I needed research; so I turned to the internet. If you type “steam powered sawmill” into Google, you get a variety of results – the best of which is a selection of YouTube videos about the…

Scratchbuild a sawmill

We needed to model a short stretch of Trans-Canada Highway 1 on our N scale Canadian Canyons layout. Highway 1, as it is most often called, follows the banks of the Thompson and Fraser Rivers in British Columbia, so it was critical that we include at least of small portion of it on the layout. When working in N scale, it’s difficult to get the colors, markings, and weathering to look correct using regular roadbuilding techniques. Plaster, paint, and weathering powders don’t always scale well, and the results can look too uneven to be realistic. All good road projects have a team of workers. After a bit of discussion with Gerry Leone, Cody Grivno, and Eric White, we decided to design the road in Adobe Illustrator and print it on paper. The…

A freight car weathering TRIPLE PLAY

Powdered pastels have been used for weathering locomotives and freight cars for many years. However, as airbrushes, artist’s oils, and even weathering decals have gained popularity, pastels have been relegated to the back of many toolboxes. But much like vinyl records today, pastels are making a comeback. There are several manufacturers that offer powdered pastels, including AK Interactive, Noch, PanPastel, and Tamiya, among others. Sometimes, pastels are offered in other forms that aren’t so obvious. Monroe Models, which also offers powdered pastels, produces a line of alcohol-based washes marketed under the Weathering Solutions line. These washes are pastels mixed with isopropyl alcohol. You can also mix pastels with paint to re-create neat effects, like oil caked on the wheel faces of cars equipped with solidbearing trucks. If you have pastels in the back of…

A freight car weathering TRIPLE PLAY

Scenery construction isn’t always about building tree-covered hillsides. I wanted a little scenic area alongside a road down a hill. A naturally formed boggy area fit the description, and it was an easy way to model something a little different. THE BASE I started off with a scenery base of plaster cloth painted with raw umber artists’ acrylics or similar brown color. To form the boggy area, I sifted tile grout on using a tea strainer. Sanded grout is the easiest to work with, as it accepts diluted white glue well. Using the back of a spoon, I hollowed out the area which would later hold the resin water. This needs to be just deep enough for the boggy area to contain a thin layer of resin without flooding over the sides.…

Decoder upgrade for a stalling Geep

However, our Athearn GP9 locomotive kept stalling on some of the trackwork. To top it off, two of the locomotive’s four headlight bulbs were broken. We decided that the time had come for some upgrades. Capacitor packs are a great way to make sound-equipped locomotives run as smooth as silk. You can buy them alone to add to existing decoders. And Train Control Systems (TCS) offers a line of decoder kits with the capacitors already installed. Knowing this day was coming, I’d ordered one of TCS’s capacitor-equipped WOW decoders for our Athearn GP9. While I was at it, I’d also gotten replacement bulbs for the headlights. Ben and I set to work. Open the hood Getting to the wiring on the Athearn locomotive is easy. Remove the two coupler box screws, pull the…

Decoder upgrade for a stalling Geep

Who doesn’t like new model railroading tricks? That’s exactly what my monthly show, “Off the Rails,” is all about. Here are a few of my favorites. Make and brake For areas on your mainline where you need to hold a car on a grade, bend a thin piece of music wire into an elongated “U” and mount it between the rails at axle-height, using spikes to hold it in place. Bend the outside end into a circle and paint it to resemble a prototype blue flag. Flip it up to stop the cars, flip it down to let ‘em pass. (Episode 23) The main attraction Tired of dumping those spikes all over and finding them with your toes? Toss a magnet into the container! The spikes will remain in a clump until you need…

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