Your Brain Changes When You Make Things - Here's the Research

I'll tell you straight away that this video isn't directly about model railroading or model making of any kind, but it's indeed all about model making :-) If you're a scratchbuilder, kit assembler, model customizer, or any sort of model maker you should watch this video. And if you're not? You especially should watch it.

One last thing. Even though my last name is of English origin I have Scottish DNA in me, which maybe is the reason I particularly appreciate her low-key, no-nonsense commentary later in the video. 

Train Song performed by Holly Cole

Crossing the Circular Bridge

Testing continues now that a lot of the scenic work is wrapping up. I need to give the track and trolley chassis a good cleaning. There's a little bit of stuttering and hesitation during the loop. So far so good though.

Six Seconds in the Mountains

Shot during a test run of the trolley and passenger trailer. I've removed the trolley's overhead pickup pole on this run. The trolley is just leaving the Circular Bridge and is heading for the stop at Inspiration Point.

An overview of Amy Bennett's work

I stumbled across this new video of a lecture by Amy Bennett overviewing her work soon after I posted my diorama and micro-layout design notes where I mentioned her work was an inspiration. The entire video is worth watching, but she has some particularly interesting insights into HO scale and lighting. As well, there are many interesting quotes, but for diorama-ists this one is particularly insightful: "But I never try to accurately recreate a place. Reality is just a jumping off point. It's much more fun to be loose and responsive to the model making process."

Miniature Scottish buildings from a wee shed

The folk art miniature building tradition is alive and well in Scotland. A must watch video.

Glenn Gould, "I’m a bit of a railway buff I guess.”

Although pre-VIA Rail trains feature throughout this show, serious train talk and Gould's admission begins around the 4:55 mark. Both the talk and visuals are impressive. One comment of Gould's at around the 6:30 mark I found particularly interesting was in his introduction to the surveyor W. "Wally" V. Maclean:

"In the course of a day long conversation when we first met he [JDL: Wally] tried to explain to me the metaphorical significance, as he saw it, of his profession. He sort of parlayed surveying into a literary tool in the same way that Jorge Luis Borges manipulates mirrors and Franz Kafka badgers beetles and as he did so I realized that his relation to this craft, which has as its subject the land, enabled him to read the signs of the land, and enabled him to find within the particular a suggestion of the infinite, and vice versa I suppose.”

The other parts of the show can be found at these links:

    Part 2

    Part 3

    Part 4

Separated at birth?

VIA's Venture (by Bachmann in this case :-) ):

The Ventures:

Running back to Bill Schopp

Vince alerted me to these 2 excellent videos by Tom Pierpoint about customizing brass locomotives. It's very impressive stuff.

Interestingly both make a tip-of-the-hat to Bill Schopp and his legendary loco customization projects.

The other thing that's been on my mind this week is The Guess Who. When I was in Austin recently I got into a long discussion about this and that in a record store with my friend's cousin. Somehow we got onto the topic of The Guess Who and their early 2000s Running Back Thru Canada tour. Since I've returned I've gotten all nostalgic and have been playing the videos from that show. There should be no doubt that Winnipeg is the great music city of Canada.

Barrelling through the trees en route to Ottawa from Toronto

Status of my N-scale tribute to E. L. Moore's Elizabeth Valley RR

My little, unfinished N-scale version of E. L. Moore’s Elizabeth Valley RR (EVRR) has been hanging on my workshop wall for a long time. Lately it has been giving me some accusatory stares along the lines of was I ever going to finish it :-) To tamp down the nagging voices in my head, and maybe start things off on the road to finishing it, I decided to make a video that would document where the layout’s at construction wise. The video making process has helped me look at the project with fresh eyes, and some improvements are now quite clear: extending the front a little with foam, maybe trying an alternative track block decomposition, replacing a valley track segment with one with a little bigger radius, and so on. The video segments are a little disjointed - and take the dates I mention with a grain of salt - but hopefully the big picture comes across.

Departing Toronto's Union Station for Ottawa

The view across my desk

I continue to play with video. I know it's no big deal to have two audio tracks attached to one video, but it is for me. On this video the first audio track has the sound of the model train going around the loop, and the second track has the sound of birds and frogs I recorded in the wild last summer.

Watch out for that tree!

I finished the big tree and planted it outside Vickis Veggies, near the street. I took a celebratory loop around the farm to honour the occasion. If there isn't already a sub-genre of model railroad videos that centre on layout trees, well, here's one :-)

To be honest I was having a lot of trouble with this tree, and at one point decided to get it finished and move on instead of continuing with the constant fiddling I was doing. I learned a lot of lessons, but there are still a few I'm working on: getting the trunk colour and texture right is a big one that still needs improvement.

I've got a few more big trees I'd like to model, but I'm going to leave those projects until the spring when I've got enough distance from this one.

Well, even though I have my complaints with this tree, I rather like how it appears on the layout. It has the commanding presence I was looking for and just seems to pull the layout together. With this and Insectary 75D finished, the major elements on the layout are done. I have a lot of detail items in mind, so they'll be next up. I think they'll take me to the spring to complete, so once the good weather has returned I'll be ready to take the layout outside for photographs.

I'm quite convinced now that if a little layout has tall elements it needs an equally thick base to create some overall visual balance. To my eye the layout would look a little odd to have tall trees, or tall buildings, and a thin base to support it all - it just wouldn't look right.

While I was working on the tree, the Deoralow was staring at me from a shelf where it's collecting dust awaiting a new location. I was struck by how small its trees are. They're store-bought ones from many years ago. They're pipsqueaks compared to Vickis, which is to scale. Well, for newly planted trees on a suburban lot, they're fine, but to populate the wild portions of a layout, they're way too small. Although my tree modelling still needs lots of work, I at least think I've come a long way in my appreciation of what layout trees need to be.

Well, speaking of appreciation, and since it's Saturday morning, here's the opening to a Saturday morning cartoon that, strangely enough, both my father and I appreciated.

Streetcar Clip #4: King at Church

Streetcar Clip #3: Somewhere along King

If you watch carefully you'll see me in a Hitchcockian cameo.

Streetcar Clip #2: Somewhere along King

Streetcar Clip #1: Along King near Yonge

Let's Ride!

With Christmas come and gone it seems like 2023 is over regardless of what the calendar has to say. Here’s a little video I took a few weeks ago to see if the farm’s track was still operating. Still lots of modelling ahead on this layout, so fun times on the horizon.

The Future is Handmade

I hadn't had any coffee when I posted this video and forgot to link to this associated article.