The White River and Northern Model Railroad: What's New?

	The N Scale

	Model Railroad

Website News Archive: 2007

12 November 2007

A long-standing goal of accumulating links to all known N scale manufacturers has at last been realized. It may not be 100% complete, but it's pretty darned close! Now that I've gone to all this effort, I'm contemplating moving the list to a separate site, which is what I did for my Z scale links, so that they're not lost within a layout website...

7 September 2007

All links have been checked, and most links pages have greatly expanded—some have grown five fold or more. It's been a long time in coming, and there's more ground yet to cover.

29 August 2007

Well, you can blame Ed Kapuscinski. Although this website started out as a blog, it was soon converted into a conventional site because I wanted to do more with it than I could with a blog. But I've always had a yen to share some more generalized, philosophical issues, but I felt as if they were lost in the noise of the rest of the site. Then, Ed posted a great entry on "modeling nothing," and it really got my writing juices flowing. Thus, 1:160 was born.

22 August 2007

When I first began building this website, I didn't have a clear idea in what directions it might progress; I started with a few basic elements, and allowed it to grow organically over time. Once in a while I've had to pause and reorganize things so that visitors could access everything easily, which becomes a bigger challenge as the content expands. The home page was getting pretty overloaded, so I moved all of the chapters on my long layout stories to a separate page: Modeling History.

13 August 2007

From the dusty virtual drawers of my PC comes an editorial that was submitted to Model Railroader several years ago and rejected: The Long and the Short of It (making the most of a small layout).

2 July 2007

The Sceniced and Ridiculously Small Railroad has been named "Website of the Week" by 2 Guyz and Sum Trains Dot Com. This is the first such acknowledgement that I've received in the 10+ years I've been on the internet. Thanks, Guyz! In other website news, a recent forum discussion on model photography inspired me to have some digital fun with one of the pinhole slides of the WR&N IV.

21 June 2007

While poking around in drawers of old stuff, I came across a cache of small items rescued from WR&N Version IV. Some of them I thought might make interesting "diversions," to present bits of insight into the work I did on that layout, and to perhaps provide some inspiration for other modelers. Enjoy the oldest detail on the WR&N IV, and the oldest structure on the WR&N IV. Then there's the superdetailed disused signal bridge.

10 June 2007

The highly-detailed and animated enginehouse now has its own feature article, embellished with over a dozen images.

2 June 2007

The relatively few surviving photographs of the WR&N Version IV still represent a fairly significant body of work, documenting many areas not seen in the Great Model Railroads article, although many more areas will be forever lost. But the images were originally sprinkled all over the website. Now they're gathered together into two thumbnail galleries: The tiny slide collection and the much larger frame grab collection. The slide set inspired me to publish a revised, two-part online version the Pennwell Tower article that appeared in the December 1999 issue of Model Railroader. Also, a photo used in the previously published magnetic uncoupler article inspired in a brief but detailed retrospective. Please note that these are all image-intensive pages.

1 May 2007

For anyone interested in seeing the Powered Hi-Rail in action, I threw together a quick video of it running along a length of Railcraft Code 40 flex track.

29 April 2007

Originally when I launched this website as well as the James River Branch, my intention was to publish articles on projects and milestones after they were completed. Recently, however, I began to see the value in presenting works in progress, since they can often be sources of ideas an information in spite of being incomplete. And in that spirit, I've published an article on my little Powered Hi-Rail, which was begun a few years ago and has yet to be finished, although the mechanism is complete and operational.

19 April 2007

A few weeks ago at Rick Spano's Sceniced and Undecided, I noticed that the barber pole light had burned out, so the following week I made repairs. This provided an opportunity to photograph the partially-disassembled mechanism; I've added the images to the expanded construction article. Also, after several failed attempts, I've finally captured an image of the silhouetted figure in the door at JB's Corner Bar, and expanded that construction article as well. It was a busy night at Rick's, as I shot videos of all remaining animation devices on his layout, which included three newAnimation Videos of my own—look for the old neon sign, police car and roof ventilators.

14 April 2007

Here's one of those "finally got around to it" items. It's a simple little clinic on a simple little skeleton car to aid hand-laying track. I made the darned thing back in 1993, so it's not like I had loads of work to do except shoot a photo of it and rattle off a quick explanation.

12 April 2007

All of the work I've been doing on Rick Spano's Animation Videos has finally got me working on Animation Videos of my own! Please enjoy eight new clips of animation projects I've made over the years, many of which now reside on Rick's Sceniced and Undecided. Of particular interest is a clip of the HO Layout in N Scale, showing the mechanism in operation.

10 April 2007

It's almost not worth mentioning, but... as I was shooting images of other projects, I came across the old photodetector-activated lighting control I built for the WR&N IV day-night lighting system. I don't know why I never thought to take a picture of it, but now I finally have.

29 March 2007

Been a while. The James River Branch has been getting most of my attention lately, which is understandable since it's a Z scale layout under construction, whereas I'm not doing any N scale work at the moment. However, I spent the evening yesterday with Rick Spano shooting videos of his animation projects, so be sure to visit his new Animation Video page, which will be updated frequently for the next week or two as I process the many videos we shot.

4 January 2007

The WR&N has had a "baby"! With no immediate opportunity for a full-sized permanent N scale home layout, I have created an "interim" source for my modeling fixes: the James River Branch. Launched today, the website will follow the construction of this new Z scale layout. Be sure to visit often!

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