Greetins' and welcome! The focus of this site will be to provide a look into the fascinating landscape of America- the historical, cultural, and natural. Thus this site will have a double focus: to provide insight into some of the more obscure parts of American history, primarily the railroad, logging, and mining related portion, and provide information on the land itself and on exploring it.

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Logs and Narrow Rails:Model Railroadin'

I have built a bit in On30 (logging) and HOn30 (again logging). I'll likely end up trying everything, though that live steam stuff, though enticing, is a wee bit beyond my budget. Donations are accepted.

Logs and Narrow Rails:Projects

Dunn Prong Logger's Shack

This little structure is based on the Central Lumber Co.'s shacks. For a picture, see Gil Hoffamn's Dummy Lines Through the Longleaf. The shack is about 22 feet long, built with boards running diagonaly. The steps of construction follow below.

No.1-Select your wood. I used some Kappler stripwood I had lying around for the outside walls. For the frame I used some basswood left over from a Duran Models pulpwood car. Normaly I would use dimensional scale lumber from Kappler, but I didn't have any on hand and I wasn't building an interior.

No.2-Stain the wood. On the previously mentioned pulpwood car I had experimented with a new technique for staining wood. Rather than use one of the more traditional stains I opted to try a watercolor method. I am a watercolor artist, so I have plenty of paint on hand,including many brown tones. For my wood stain I used Cotman Raw Sienna and Burnt Umber. The Sienna works fine right out of the tube,but the Umber must be lightened with water. Apply the paints right on to the wood,increasing the darkness in one spot,then lightening it in another. The stain works best for light to mediumly weathered wood. Allow the stain to dry. There may be some warpage in the stripwood, but it will not affect the finished model. Don't apply the watercolors to a finished model, the warpage will most likely damage the appearance (don't ask how I know).

No.3-Cut the wood to size. I first drew up some rough plans on paper,then cut the wood and assembled it over the plan. Use a scale ruler, but don't worry to much about the appearance of the plan(the lumber companies didn't...to often), just make sure the dimensions line up correctly.

No.4-Build the frame. I built the simple frame over the plans, assembling each wall seperately.

No.5-Glue on the stripwood. The most time consuming part. Build each wall slowly,and weather the individual boards with an Ex-acto blade. Be sure to leave room for the door and windows! The door can be made from the same wood.Keep it simple, but remember to include a doorknob. I used a small piece of styrene.

No.6-Glue the walls together. With the individual walls complete, they can now be put together. Keep them square,assembling one corner at a time. A couple pieces of wood may be needed where the edges meet each other.

No.7-Build a roof and floor. I built the "floor" using as few boards as possible, since it wouldn't be seen. The roof is built by first laying out diagonaly running boards, then laying horizontal roof boards over them. I then glued the roof on,and laid "tarpaper" made from a tissue-like wrapping paper. Black Floquil paint was used to color and hold the paper down. A bit of fraying at the edges, a few patches ,and you have some very real-looking tarpaper.

No.8-Finishing touches. Add a smokestack, made from Plastruct tubing, weather the roof and sides a bit with pastel chalks, and you have a very nice little shanty for your loggers to call home. Before placing it on the base, add two rough hewn beams to the bottom. I use split pine heart from old fence posts. Now glue it down to a dirted in base, and add groung foam, logs, sticks and vines.A pile of firewood will ensure your loggers warmth and a pot of hot coffee. Some Sierra West detail parts, a stepping block by the door, and you're finished!

Handcar Trailer

Logging roads often had a substantial fleet of speeders, handcars, and handcar trailers. I built a simple little trailer in HOn3. The project was very easy and inexspensive, but adds an interesting detail. I don't have a prototype, but it resembles similar cars.

No.1-The frame. I used a little Precision Scale Company brass frame, which is composed of a wood deck, wheels and axles, and a bottom section desigened to fasten the wheels to the deck. Assemble it with ACC, then paint, preferably a dark brown. Most of this section will not be visible.

No.2-Decking. Select stripwood for the decks, and trim it to size. Glue the boards across the brass deck and stain or paint. I used a dark,dirty mix of Floquil colors for this wood.

No.3-Deck braces. Lay two wider boards down the trailer length-wise, then lay two narrower boards across these at each end. These boards, and the ones following, I stained using the watercolor method outlined above. Keep in mind that prototypes were often built in the company shops, from on-hand materials. Thus, the boards may be frayed and weathered, and aren't all the same color or have the same degree of weathering.

No.4-Side frame. This section was really added to cover up the undetailed side of the PSC frame, but its reasonably possible that something similar might have existed.To begin, glue four boards, trimmed to 8mm, at each corner. Once these have dried, glue two boards, on each side, over these. The bottom board should be widest. Leave a 2mm space between them. The crew now has a way to get on to the trailer. Attach two end boards at each end, and the basic trailer is finished. These boards should match the thinner braces.

No.5-Coupler. For a coupler, I used piece of thin chain attached to one of the small projections on the PSC frame. This is similar to coupling used on prototype trailers and speeders.

No.6-Details. Nut-bolt-washer castings were glued to the side frame and rusted up with chalk. I placed two stakes at one end of the trailer, against which I put a Sierra West resin casting of a pipe rack. Beside this I placed another casting, this one a box of clutter. To finish it off I added a length of chain, a few cinders, some dirt(the section crew doesn't clean its boots), and a scrap of wood. The end product is very unique and eye-catching.

Sticks and Stones...are all over them mountains!

In the course of wandering the vast Appalachians, you experience the "scenery" up close and personal, whether its a bone-chilling creek, insanely steep knife edge ridges, brutally thick rhododendron and laurel "hells", and every other rugged feature in the mountains the tourist guides call "gentle". The lumbermen faced the challenge of pushing a railroad into this terrain, and met it with Shays, incline climbing skidders, curve-hugging cuts, switchbacks, and spindly trestles. Endless rocks and boulders, gushing mountain rivers, thick ridge top mire, towering broadleaf(+100 species) and evergreen trees, vines, and many other common features of the terrain are my challenges, not to conquer, but to model. some are harder than others...

Mired in the Past

Seeing a disscusion on the 4l email logging list concerning mud, I set my mind to work on the problem of modeling that stuff that isn't water and it isn't dirt. In the Appalachians, a particularly thick, black mud develops in rock basins where rainwater can not escape. This mire is most prevelant on horse trails in the high country, and no doubt plauged loggers as much as it does backpackers today. To model it, and started with my sure-fire recipe for dirt...dirt, plain and simple. I took a scrap of wood and spread some glue and water over it, then sprinkled on a generous amount of dirt, followed by some water. On top of this I dropped some black India ink I bought at an art store. The key here is moderation. To much ink leaves a black spot that looks the Valdez oil spill. Once the ink has soaked into the wet dirt, blend it in well, and adding more dirt if needed. Allow it to dry some, then sculpt it in to a nice rutted form. I added some roots sticking out, and sprinkled a few leaves, made from crushed real leaves, in to the mud. Tracks made with a pointed tool finish it off. Now let it dry completely(probably over night). It should maintain its "wetness", looking very muck like mud. For standing water some casting resin could probably be used. Clipper oil can be used to increase the wet look as well (I'm not kidding). The end result is thick, black mire for your loggers to get stuck in.

It's not Kudzu...

But the big vines of the mountains are impressive, although they don't cover slow-moving cows. I have seen specimens the size of my leg in diameter, and growing a hundred feet up in a tree. Judging from photos (and storm blowdowns, much like clearcuts), after logging an area there were many vines and limbs on the ground. To model this I use Spanish moss (not a moss and not Spanish). It grows wild in South Mississippi and other parts of the Hot, er Deep, South. Elsewhere I'm sure it is avaliable in garden stores. I stretch it apart and lay it on the ground or wrap it around a tree or log. This works well for the numerous small vines, but a small grape vine could be used for the really big vines. As for the leaves, well, they're sparse and rarely seen below the canopy. Being pulled from the tree no doubt whacks most of the leaves off anyway. This simple technique provides some twisting vines for your poor loggers to trip on.

Splittin' Wood

As if your loggers didn't have enough to worry about, they have to split wood (and peel potatoes?). Yee-haw! Well, my loggers don't carry out this task, we've got contract to cut our slab wood, but that's beside the point. The point (I think) is how to model the slab wood. If your lumber company burns wood, rather than coal or oil (in other words, a bit back-ards), then this tech-nique will work for you. My logging railroad burns wood, and the machine shop boiler and loggers shanties do as well. To keep them stocked, I find an old fence post and carry it home. If you try this, make sure there isn't a fence on the post. You urbanites out there are probably out of luck on this part, although some good pine heartwood will work just as well. Anyway, take the fencepost and split off sections, then split em' some more, into smaller sections. You can now quarter them into scale slabs. The weathered outside surface makes good "bark", while the inside heartwood looks like heartwood(wow). Your loggers will thank you for the nice flaming knots.

Four-wheel Caboose

This project was dirt cheap. How cheap, you ask? I didn't spend a dime on it, instead using stuff I already had on hand. I did have to scrounge around my boxes of old supplies though, and do some improvision. a very similar model could be easily built for a few dollars, proving once again that narow gauge doesn't have to be expensive. The end result of my project was a great little well detailed car.

Prototype- There really wasn't one, although it is loosely based on a car run by the three-foot gauge logging railroad of the Whiting Lumber Company in East Tennessee. Their caboose was a flatcar with a shack mounted on one end, while my car is simply the shack.

Tech-nique

No.1 Build a frame. My frame is about 10 feet long and built from some structural beams i had lying about. The frame is simple, just four length-wise beams and two cross beams. Atop this I laid the floorboards from some 2x4's. A beam fo the truck and two blocks of wood between the length running beams gave a spot to mount hthe couplers, which will be link and pin.

No.2 Build a body. The body is composed of a frame of structural pieces of stripwood covered with 2x6's. I added a single window that was left over from a Serra West kit.

No.3 Add interior detail. A crate, shelf, stove, and a few spare parts totaled up the details for my crummy. After all, logging railroads weren't frilly operations!

No.4 Add body to frame. Simply glue the body on to the frame and add a door. My door was nothing more than a simple affair cobbled up from some stripwood. I left it hanging open in order to show off the interior detail.

No.5 Roof. The roof was built by attaching two boards at either end togther and then placing boards across the primitive frame. Tissue paper representing rolled roofing was then glued on. The final detail was to add a stove pipe cut from some tubing.

No.6 Trucks and final detail. The truck for my caboose is a cheap MDC truck, heavily weathered. It was simply glued on, although it would also be a good idea to screw it on to the body. My final detials were a pair of stirrups and nut-bolt-washer castings on the end beams.

There you have it! A little weathering and and some paint finishes it up. Your brakemen won't have to hop a log car anymore!

Note: As of a later date, from building the above shanty-car, I decided to repaint it. A darker brown coat was given, for wood color, and a spattering of white applied. I also afixiated a brake wheel to the side of the platform, a fine detail for some added interest.

A Simple Camp Car

Many logging roads utilized camp cars, simple structures, akin to a boxcar, mounted on trucks. While there does not seem to be any particular agreement in use, my definition of a camp car is a structure permenately connected to trucks, as opposed to camp shacks lifted on and off of log cars. I decided to build a camp car, but in narrow gauge, which seemed to have been rather rare. And instead of a traditional two truck camp car, I built a one truck car, very small, limited to one occupant. Below are the steps to building it.

No. 1 Frame. Quite simple, I built up a box frame using scale two by fours, measuring roughly eight feet long, six feet high, and seven feet wide, give or take a foot (note that camp cars were not intended to be moved very often). Over this I laid, horizontialy, rough "planks", scored at the ends, leaving a door and window. For the lower frame, some medium sized beams (pardon the vagueness!) glued together compose it, with nut-bolt washer castings at each end. The upper frame was glued to this.

No. 2 Truck. A Rio Grande Models truck glued to the frame. Overtly complicated, yes, but I avoid being to simple!

No. 3 Interior Details. Great fun, these! I constructed a bed, six feet long, from a couple pieces of stripwood, and covered it in tissue paper painted bright yellow, then, after placing the bed on two stripwood blocks, glued ti down inside the camp car. A white pillow, again of tissue paper, rounds this detail out. An oil drum stove, with a Rio Grande stovepipe, wasplaced in the corner, with several blocks of firewood scattered about. A wooden chest, really a piece of wood painted dark brown, and a Sierra West casting of a tool shelf (mounted on the wall), finish off the details.

No.4 Diorama Base I chose a small piece of thin plywood, about two times longer than the camp car, and covered it with dirt (held down by glue of course). A small portion of track, with hand split ties, was spiked down, and various bits of detail, including some limbs and such, were added. Then, on the track, I glued down the camp car. Leading up to it I placed a ramp, a length of stripwood with smaller segments glued onto it for traction.

No. 5 The Roof. There is no roof. Rather, to keep the interior open, I left it off. Instead of a roof there is a construction scene, with a ladder leaning against the wall, rusted coorugated panels strewn about on the ground, and fresh lumber all about. A sawhorse, a barrel, and fragments of wood make the scene more convincing, and the inside of the car is open for all to see.

There you have it! Now, let's hope it doesn't rain...