John..............

Cool build.

Thanx
Bob

Wow  ! ! ! ! !


That is amazing...


thanx

Bob

Mornin's all...............

Not much bench time today........  Errands abound ! ! ! !

Tom.......  I really like the tracks on fire photo.........   I think Chicago's motto should be,  "There is no substitute for brute force".

see ya
Bob

George...

That is super............

I have no place on my railroad for such a swamp model...............  Idaho is pretty dry and I doubt if there is anywhere in the state that could be determined to be a swamp.   


I have a dry wash under a bridge and my grand daughter cannot understand why there is no water under it. "Why have a bridge?" she maintains.

Great model.

Thanx
Bob

Tom..........

I know that station well.

I had a girlfriend in the mid 60's while in college who lived in Decatur, Illinois.   Your dating of the photo is exactly when I would have been going through there.  I traveled down there often to see her.  Dearborn station always seemed to be a bit grungy compared to Union or the Northwestern stations.  They were of course much newer.  Maybe it was only that Dearborn was sort of dark, both in the waiting rooms and the platforms.

Thanx for  putting this up.

Bob

Mornin' all...............

Wednesday is my day for zoom book groups and such.   A little bench time on both sides of that.   


Dave....      The box cars are great............... 


In the car business we called that making up of batches of stuff and finding ways streamline stuff... flat rating.   That was a commission pay structure for time allotments for this or that job based on tenths of an hour and how long it was generally agreed upon to get something done.    A lot of  customers didn't like the mechanism BUT....  if something took longer to do the customer paid the same.  Also..... if the car came back as not fixed........ The customer didn't pay again either.    In my years as service manager with Mercedes Benz, I did studies and for long term customers came out even on both sides.

How close is the total weight come out to NMRA standards ? ? ? ?

That is a very interesting construction method.................... thanx

see ya
Bob

Thank you all..............

see ya
Bob

Mornin' all.....

Errands in the morning and bench time this afternoon.     The water tower that John has been working on prompted me to go back and redo the base of an old Miur Models tank where the tank was cool and well thought out but the base was funky.

I'm doing it with that same brick material that I used on my Chicago house build.  It's not an easy material but it looks great.

I'll put up some photos when I get a bit closer.

For now.................   have a great day.....

see ya
Bob

So I got the house sorta planted...... I still need to glue down the sidewalk and make up the flower boxes that were on the front of the house.   The mountings are still on the today photo but the boxes that were sandstone are long gone.

I'm modeling the house in 1950 so they will need to be there.   My grandfather was into petunias so every spring we would go down to Green Street (I couldn't begin to make that one up) and come home with two flats for the boxes.  I'll get that done soon.

For now..........here is a street level view of the house.



I did not have a lot of locations for this on my railroad as this structure has a large footprint.  It ended up along the trolley line in Boise.   I wish that I had lived this close to the tracks in while growing up in Chicago.  As it was, we practically "lived" in the Milwaukee Road yard at Cragin, about three blocks away.  This was in the last years of steam and the near retirement engineers would pull us up into the locomotive and let us ring the bell and blow the whistle.  Great times to grow up.


Then here is the back porch with some paint on it.



A view from a higher vantage point.



Here is a photo from Google earth today.

Looks good to me....


Thanx
Bob

Pretty cool..... sir

Thanx
Bob

The railings were tongue and groove boards so they were closed as I have made them.  That spaced stuff was put there after 1983 when I took some photos while on a visit to Chicago. 


Thanx all


Bob

Just plain WOW...........

thanx
Bob

John..............

This was the kit that I never scored.    In 1968 a friend kit collected for me while I was on the rivers in Viet Nam.  When I got home he had a great selection of stuff that had come available while I had been away.  Cost me a solid 300 bux.


In that batch was four Campbell flat car kits......... no one even remembers that they made car kits................  several Canadian Railway Models CRM refrigerator kits including Barf Beer and Foe Nee Baloney and one other.  No one remembers these either.  And a bunch of other now forgotten stuff.


In all of that was the FSM engine house.  A solid ten bux at the time and we all thought it was a lot at the time.

I later built the engine house and later still the tar paper roof that was in the kit was just too much black and overshadowed other structures.  So I re did the roof and made it look like a crew was putting on a new roof.  And then later again I put a complete interior in the building and made the original structure a lift off to be able to see it.

I never acquired the water tank that George released only shortly after the engine house.   So it is really fun to watch you build it now..

Thanx
Bob

Joe..........

This structure has it all.........

Great corbels, closed side stair well and a roof level access...............  Can't wait to see what you might do with the store front and possible signs.........

This is really cool............

than
Bob