Coffee and Miniature Buildings and Godzilla....

... who could ask for more? Certainly not moi. I came across these at the legendary Max's Models and was not disappointed. If that one isn't enough, there's this 'making of' too:

Big waves from the ocean lookout

Cleaning up the workshop has a few upsides other than the obvious: I found some long lengths of styrene ladder stock, which meant I could finish the ocean overlook without having to buy any more stuff.

A suitable length was cut and painted a messy yellow, and, voila, it was done.

Would I want to be up there, 30 scale feet in the air, on an old, repurposed, rickety and tilted elevated gate tower? Especially after climbing that ladder. No way. 

But, it looks like there's a party going on, so maybe I'd need to make an exception. Where's my sunscreen?

Of lollipop trees and fall rains

This is a sample of the trees that line the visitor parking between the highway and the Havelock yard. There's plenty of parking, shaded picnic tables, and lots of green space to wander up-and-down and look at whatever happens to be in the yard that day.

The structure of these rather ornamental trees is in sharp contrast to their nearby wild brethren. These things are more like commercially available model railroad trees, but with one big difference: look at how tall they are compared to the vehicles in the parking lot.

The rainy days of fall are starting to arrive, which is my signal for cleaning up the workshop in preparation for layout construction. A tedious but necessary job that'll take a few sessions to finish. Soon the rains will have stripped the leaves, and all the tree photos will be of branch structure. Good timing for all this.

Another variation on Atlas’ elevated gate tower

Images snipped and assembled from here

The last few weeks I’ve been scanning the internet for photos of highly scenicked slot car layouts. I was interested in seeing how the other half lived :-) It was on one such expedition that I ‘discovered’ that photo of Pretty Village models on John Swartzell’s model railroad. 

As well as being primed to see E. L. Moore buildings and Pretty Village models, I’m now apparently primed to see Atlas elevated gate towers. While on another slotted voyage of discovery yesterday I spotted this slightly modified Atlas elevated gate tower being used as a race observation station on the corner of this slot car layout. In this version everything above the building’s belt line has been cut off to produce an open-air observation stand. It looks like a few of these were used around the layout.

Ocean lookout

I have been doing little model building these last few months. We're making the most of the good weather while it's still here.

However, now and then, in spare moments, I've been trying out an idea for converting the classic Atlas elevated gate tower kit into a freelanced ocean lookout. It's getting close to done. I'm at the point where I need to work on weathering, and adding a very long ladder from the beach to the little building.

The Lost Ocean Line Mk II will have coast, and along with an Apollo Lifeguard Module or two, there'll be this thing to keep an eye on the surf.

I need to find a figure holding binoculars up to its eyes, scanning the horizon for trouble. Sharks, maybe? :-)