The castle in Ruritania/Graustark is home to members of the royal family, but it’s also open for tours. Here you see the ticket stand where a member of the castle staff is directing tourists.
Once the groundcover has grown up around the bases, it will look better, but it’s pretty good as it is.
This Hauptstraße (Main Street) building was in need of some work. I’d never put the sign on the front, and some of the other signs were fading. In addition, the “foundation” was made of cast material that didn’t stand up to the weather as well as I’d hoped.
It looks a lot better now. The sign is using a new preservative technique that I first tried on my castle sign… I thoroughly coated it with UV Resist, then once it was dry encased it in resin, then resprayed with UV resist. We’ll see how it holds up, but I’m hopeful.
This is cumulative from the last four days…
Here’s the gatehouse
Progress on fitting the roof curve ot the turret 
A different view
The arcade
Progress on the main building
Arcade windows and door
I’m adding a castle (probably the final building) to the layout this spring. I’ve started working on the overall plan/layout and checking the size to ensure it won’t overwhelm the layout…
Here’s an elevation of the front… 
I installed the motor, set up the front door vignette, and have all the lights working. It’s done for now…
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The Pola windmill is now complete. Lights added and the whole thing put together, here it is on the workbench.
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I expect it to make a big impression on the layout.
All that’s left is to motorize the blades and it’ll be ready to go outside.
Good progress today… Here’s the mill test-fitted together and a view of it inverted so you can see the detail of the woodwork. This is pretty neat, though it will be out of sight to most observers.
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I bought this a few weeks ago:
Continue reading New Structure for the Layout
Here are those KaDee logs, all painted up and in an acrylic “holder” (I love my laser cutter!) near the sawmill
Here are the “finished” buildings for the sawmill and trackside warehouse scene.
This is the Mill and warehouse together
Here’s the sawmill interior
Continue reading Sawmill and Lumber Warehouse
I really should have done it this winter, but I was busy building new buildings and finishing up the track work. So it’s time to drag in a few buildings that sat outside all winter and work on them. First up was my kitbashed CMS main street building. While the front windows still look good and the lights in them are fine, I realized that I’d put no lights on the loading doc. This turned out to be a mistake, since that’s the side that faces the house. So I added three LED lights to the loading doc which really added to the look of the town at night.
I’m working on a couple of new buildings for the layout. The first is the Pola lumber mill
The second is the Piko BayWa warehouse
Continue reading New Buildings in Progress
One really nice thing about laser cutting styrene structures is that once the file is created, you can cut as many as you want with (almost) no additional effort. This one has a different roof (made from a CMS shingle pattern section) and I tried out some laser cut windows and doors. But the walls are cut from the same file as the other one.
So I built this house for around $10 in materials: half of a $4 sheet of 6mm sintra, $3 worth of Plastruct strips, $4 for the roof panel, and some paint. And (IMO) it looks as good as a more expensive kit-built structure–for sure from 10 feet away.
Continue reading Laser cut houses
Here’s another of my “winter” projects. This is a European house for the residential section of my town.
Continue reading European House
I tend to buy used G scale stuff, because my railroad is on a shoestring budget. A couple months back I bought a couple of Piko shops that were badly in need of repair. One thing they needed was new windows. The old plastic was brittle and opaque, so I thought about casting new panes and using acrylic for the glass. But getting a good casting for something so fine turned out to be harder than I thought. So I decided to laser cut a set.
I’ve completed the factory interior and put it out on the layout. It’s set above the level of the terrain so that the loading dock is at the correct height for flat or boxcars to load the motorcycles.
Here’s how various interior parts were made…
Bookstore
The book spines are a mix of sizes of styrene glued together and painted, and some images printed and stuck to styrene and sprayed with UV resistant spray. The books where you can see the covers are also styrene with images attached. I tried to find images of older books (the 1920’s E.R.B Tarzan books for example, in German) and posters to use. The open book in the center was cast from a HistArts set of molds that I bought to create dining car and warehouse interiors
Continue reading Shop Window Details
Here are a set of CMS structures I’m finishing up for the main street in my town.
Locomotives increase their traction by applying sand to the rails. The sand is carried in tanks on the loco and directed to the wheels through a series of tubes. In order for the system to work (not clod) the sand must be dry. Thus the sand house, a building where sand is dried before being pumped into the sand tower for loading on the trains.
I saw this online:
and really wanted one.
Continue reading Sand house
