My venture into making the palms entirely on my own from scratch seems to have worked. I wasn’t sure going in if it would. The trunks were made by taking a 1/4″ styrene rod, chucking it in a drill, and spinning it slowly while holding the sharp edge of a jeweler’s file against it as […]
It’s been a week of fine tuning on the LAJ. Micro Engineering currently has the market on the most prototypical looking turnouts. They are prone to electrical dead spots though. Tam Valley frog juicers, absolutely ingenious devices, quickly solved that problem. I also had some gremlins in the track around one of the […]
The pad printing and details on my newly acquired Athearn LAJ CF-7 are really quite nice. The issue with Athearn RTR locos, however, is that their low cost drive trains tend to be fairly rough runners. I really needed to find a way to upgrade it since it would be relegated to slow speed switching. […]
Tracking down appropriate CF-7’s was proving to be elusive. Thanks to David and Guenther for coming to the rescue and setting me up with a unit each. Before getting into detailing and weathering, I want to spend some time sorting out the drive trains to see if any re-powering will be necessary, especially for the […]
Here’s the District Blvd. grade crossing with the photo wallpaper laminated on. The sidewalks and crossing signals remain to be installed.