Semi-finished scenes

It's not done by a longshot, but here are a few shots I've taken of some of the more complete areas of the layout. (The latest shots are at the bottom of the page. In some cases I've replaced earlier shots with similar ones taken later on, when the scenery was more complete.) This page takes a little time to load because I tried to keep the quality of the photos higher than normal, and no Photoshop magic (other than color correction) has been done on any of them.

Besides these pictures, I've scratchbuilt and fully detailed a depot for a diorama. You can see those shots on The Westcott Depot page.

11/24/00 Here's the Andersen Window factory, a backwoods sawmill I scratchbuilt in 1979, board-by-board. Finally, it's found a permanent home in Froton, the first scenicked trackside area on the railroad.
	01/22/01 A person's-eye-view of the road near the Andersen plant. I got the hang of making Aspen trees from peppergrass (a time consuming task, but worth it in the end) and spread half a dozen here and there. This is the angle I later used for both my Railroad Model Craftsman "Marker Lamps" cover shot and the 2005 NMRA calendar shot. You can see those shots by following the links. The final shot is also on this page, farther down.
01/22/01 By mid-January Black River was finally finished. I made it with three pours of two-part EnviroTex resin, made the waves from gloss medium (opposite of matte medium), and included details like this fly fisherman and a few scale-sized fish. All told, I used about half-a-gallon of EnviroTex. The river is about 3/4" deep at the far end (see below). The fly fisherman is by Preiser.
	02/03/01 The kids enjoy themselves in the cool river water. The figures are by Preiser. The clothes in the background are painted tin foil. This shot shows the nice gentle ripple effect that the gloss medium makes on the surface of the river.
04/13/01 Here's Neener Street, the main drag in the town of LaPointe. All buildings visible in this shot are Design Preservation Models. I scratchbuilt the streetlights. The scene at the far end of the street (where the white-topped blue car is) is actually reflected in a mirror (which you can read about on my LaPointe page).
	05/20/01 Here's a LaPointe person's eye-view of Neener Street, as seen from just outside Louise's Korner Kafe. To give you an idea of scale, the upper part of that lamppost in the foreground is about 1/16" in diameter.
05/24/01 This is the alley behind Neener Street. The brown-ballasted track is the mainline emerging from the Froton/LaPointe tunnel, and the black-ballasted track is the siding that serves Drywell Inks.
.	05/25/01 Just down the road apiece from the Andersen plant in Froton, a local emerges from a cut and travels along the ridge next to the Black River. This is the same spot featured in the pictures "A Tale of Four Ridges" on my Froton page. The fascia board is 1/8" Masonite.
06/22/01 It's late on an August day at the Highway 27 grade crossing that leads into downtown LaPointe. This digital shot was taken with a single 75-watt floodlight as illumination, at an exposure time of 4 seconds, and the camera's fluorescent filter on (to give it that reddish cast).
	06/22/01 Pardon me for over-indulging myself, but I was so tickled by the way these two photos turned out, I decided to post them both. Same light bulb, same exposure. I just moved the camera over a couple of feet and took this shot of Neener Street the same way.
09/23/01 A few miles to the north of LaPointe you'll find The Whitney K. Towers Memorial Bridge, a Howe Truss bridge spanning the valley in which the Soo Line's mainline runs. There are some construction shots of this on the Ravine page.
	10/06/01 Burt "Birdie" Foster just brought his brand new '53 Ford Victoria over to Igot's Gas Station outside of Froton, and the boys can't wait to poke and prod everything under the hood. The gas station is located directly across the road from the Andersen plant in Froton (see the first two pictures on this page).
08/30/02 If you stood on top of the tunnel portal at the north end of Froton, here's the view you'd have. The Andersen plant is to the near left, Igot's Gas is in the center, and the Froton Creamery is the white building on the edge of the forest. B. Chubb's Operational Hardware is across the river on the far right.
	08/30/02 Take a hike from the Froton tunnel across the hills of Holishyte Point and you'll get to the LaPointe tunnel portal. Here's what you'd see from there.
.08/30/02 Even though we haven't quite figured out yet what the Bicktul Company makes, it sure is a busy place, based on the amount of clutter lining their rail-side dock.
10/17/02 Elsbernd Antiques -- named after our house contractors, good friends, and antique lovers Teresa and Jerry Elsbernd -- is the first structure to be built for the town portion of of Glen Oaks. (In these shots it's mounted on a stand-alone diorama base.) This building was built from a kit by JL Innovative Designs named "McSoreley's Old Ale House." Except I decided to build a mirror image of the kit so this interesting side of the building would be seen on the layout. That created more work for me, but the result was worth it. Here's a closeup of the front of the store. Some of the details were scratchbuilt, but there are well over 20 commercial castings among the clutter out here, plus several "shelf" castings inside the store.
	10/17/02 Up on the roof, two women take down the laundry. The quilt the older woman is shaking out is a photocopy reduction of a real quilt Renay made that hangs in our Great Room. The quilt on the clothesline is another reduction of a quilt Renay made. And, yes, those are eentsy-beentsy clothespins I made.
5/05 Here's almost the entire diorama. It won "Best of Show - Offline Display" at the 2005 Thousand Lakes Region Convention modeling contest, and "Second Place - Offline Display" at the 2005 national NMRA Convention in Cincinnati. The bakery was entirely scratchbuilt and contained full interior details. You can see shots of it on my Glen Oaks page.
	06/05/05 "The Grade Crossing at LaPointe" A car waits under the wig-wag the grade crossing that leads into downtown LaPointe. This shot was awarded a "2nd Place - Model Photograph" at the 2005 Thousand Lakes Region Convention, and it was given the "Chairman's Award for Photography" at the 2005 Cincinnati NMRA Convention. This shot also appeared in "Trackside Photos" in the February 2007 issue of *Model Railroader. You can see a larger version of it on my "Articles*" page.
06/05/05 This shot graced the cover of the January 2005 issue of Railroad Model Craftsman magazine (you can see the cover on my "articles" page), and goes along with a 5-page article on making marker lamps. The shot also won "1st Place - Model Photography" at the 2005 Thousand Lakes Region Convention in Mason City, IA. The picture was taken at Froton on my layout.
	06/05/05 Here's a view down the track at Froton, taken from the road shown in the shot above. That's the Farmers Gilt Edge Creamery in the background. This shot won Third Place in Walthers' annual "Magic of Model Railroading" contest, and is published in the 2006 Walthers catalog.
06/05/05 Yet another shot taken at Froton... here's the BV's only diesel, a Broadway Limited SW7, at the grade crossing. You can see the little man in the brown sport coat still standing there from the "marker lamps" photo shot. This photo was was accepted for the 2006 NMRA calendar (it's on "May") and also won "Honorable Mention" in the Walthers 2006 catalog "Magic of Model Railroading" contest.
	06/16/06 Here's the way it looks to a visitor who's entering the town of Glen Oaks. The team track is on the left, as is the passenger station. And the main row of businesses is straight ahead.
06/16/06 Just a little to the right of the above scene... there's the flagstop station and, the Valley Growers Grains elevator. Glen Oaks is called "An Award Winning Town" because the majority of the structures in it have won awards in contests of one sort or another.
	06/16/06 The team track in Glen Oaks is always a busy place. Here the foreman chats with a truck driver just as a new load of lumber arrives.
06/16/06 At the south end of town is the largest industry on the layout -- the Diljak/A-1 Container Company. This 4-building complex consists of three scratchbuilt buildings and one kitbashed building. Two of the buildings were subjects of construction articles I wrote for Railroad Model Craftsman magazine. You can see those on my Articles page.
	06/16/06 Somebody wasn't paying attention and let one of the brand new crates slip off the back end of a pallet. Old Man Diljak ain't gonna like that!
08/18/07 It's early morning, and the fog hasn't burned off the fields or stream yet, as BV #22 crosses the bridge on its first run of the day.
	08/18/07 At this time in the morning, there's no one up but the farmers and the railroad engineers. Looks like it's going to be another hot August day.


*Construction shots:*	Benchwork \| Scenery \| Finished Scenes
*Layout:*	Trackplan & Specs
*Misc:*	The Road to MMR \| Articles I've written Durango & Silverton RR Shots \|About Me

Finished and semi-finished scenes
(ok, are they ever really finished?)

Updated 06/17/06

Finished and semi-finished scenes (ok, are they ever really finished?)

Updated 06/17/06

Finished and semi-finished scenes
(ok, are they ever really finished?)