The Building of River Plate Station - Fine Scale Miniature's Brownsville Depot

[Andy Reynolds]

I'm new to this site, and I'd like to share my You Tube video on how I built George Sellios' Brownsview Depot-Jewel Series 15 . At the beginning and then the end you will see my completed craftsman kit along with 3 more completed FSM kits - Roadside Delight kit 270, Skinner's Row JS-6 , Jamestown Waterstop JS-16, which were taken at the NMRA convention in Cleveland,OH in July 2014.  My video is a collection of 120 narrated photos taken with my Nikon SLR camera. While the video is 41 minutes long, I have snap shot almost each and every task, with detailed comments on how I aged, weathered and built the River Plate Station.
Go to https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lIFYuE5-brQ
Enjoy! I'll have more videos soon.

[Andy Reynolds]

Thanks for all the reviews so far. Does anyone have any suggestions?

[jbelwood]

Wow Andy, that module looks super. Having built 12 FSM kits (all on my layout) I can related to
all of the work you put into this. You will have it at the Amherst show in January, won't you.

[Andy Reynolds]

Hi John, yes I will have it at the Amherst Show on January 24-25. I will also bring it this weekend (Dec 6-7) to New England Train Expo (http://www.hubdiv.org/fallshow/index.htm) at the Best Western Royal Plaza Trade Center,Marlboro,MA. I also was able to help George Sellios squeeze in a late entrance table for his new kit "The Hazen Boyd Company" As you know, they are limited edition kits.  So anyone who hasn't got one of the FSM kits, they will be able to see George's new kit, built by him,  at the Marlboro Show.
As you mentioned, and appreciated the time involved in his kits, it took me all total 400 hrs to build the 4 kits, make the module and work on my  road, lighting and scenery. What one cannot see at the end of the You Tube is the crowning of my roads that were built with "All Weather Asphalt Roof Cement" by Black Jack (sold at True Value) and fine black gravel. I even made all the curbing with sculpture clay from AC Moore.
I plan on making a video on this road technique in the future, around some of Ed Fulasz' hydrocal buildings on what will be called "The Fall River Industry" module.

[Andy Reynolds]

John, Obviously I had help with the road work, from CCM (http://www.ccmodels.com/closed-caterpillar.shtml). I had fun not only with my technique, but playing with my construction equipment.

[Andy Reynolds]

Can someone help me? My pictures from my Nikon are 4-5MBs. I got a too large to upload, so I added them as pdf files, and this seems to work. Not sure how you all have the pics show without clicking on the files, as I looked at my first rely and I had to click on the file to see.

[Andy Reynolds]

and the last one...

[jbelwood]

Hey Andy...Your CCM CAT dozer got me to thinking. My new strip mining operation could use one of these.



https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rGbo1R8a27g

[Andy Reynolds]

John, yes that little clip on the dozer in cool. They are pricey $1500 plus, I think. At least that is what i think I paid for a similar one 10 years ago.

[bparrish]

Andy,...


Regarding your photo size..........

Do you have any sort of photo editor where you can shrink them down to five inches in the longest dimension and have the total file size under a meg? 

I use Photoshop but I know there are others out there too.  I can help with PS but not much help with any other editor.

This seems to be the easiest for me and no one has complained ............  The galleries on the site here never seem to fill up either and I have put a ton of photos up.

see ya
Bob

[Andy Reynolds]

Bob, Thanks for the advise about Photo Shop and getting the pic size down. I do own Adobe's Photo Element. I might try that, so I can post actual shots on this Forum, so people don't have to click at each attachment. I am sure many people give cursory views and don't necessarily have the time to download attachments.

[bparrish]

Andy...

I forgot to mention that jpeg is probably the most compact format.  Tiff is an old Apple proprietary format (I think) and it is rather sloppy about size.

I never have any problem getting a jpeg up onto the gallery.

see ya
Bob

[deemery]

TIFF is not an Apple proprietary format.  It's an industry standard, just like JPEG.  The big difference between TIFF and JPEG is that TIFF guarantees no loss of information, while JPEGs are compressed and can lose detail.  So TIFFs will (almost) always be bigger than JPEGs, and JPEGs are what most forums, etc, want for posting images on-line.


Here's an example of a photo saved as JPEG at full resolution, versus the same photo saved at 90% compression.  (The latter is "ridiculous' but gives you a sense of what happens during the compression.)  The difference in image sizes is 257kb for the full-resolution photo vs 30kb for the highly compressed photo.


Note that the screen size of the image (length x width) is not the same as its compression.  You can have a large image that is highly compressed, versus a small image that is not compressed at all. 


You'll want to reduce the display size of an image, and then apply a bit of compression to that resulting image (e.g 3" x 5") so it stays within the maximum size for the forum. 


Hope this helps...


dave

[Andy Reynolds]

OK - I dropped the picture size to 3x5, but this looks like I took up 1/4 of a piece of paper...hmmm (this was using Adobe Acrobat 9.

[deemery]

OK - I dropped the picture size to 3x5, but this looks like I took up 1/4 of a piece of paper...hmmm (this was using Adobe Acrobat 9.

The problem is you saved this as a PDF (Portable Document Format) file, rather than a JPEG picture.  You don't want to use Acrobat for this (I'd say "you don't want to use Acrobat for -anything-, but that might be a religious debate :-)   Photoshop Elements or some other image editor is the right tool for this job.


dave