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Hit another bump in the road in the process of incorporating the Northern SNE's Charlton Branch into my layout. Luckily this bump was not the same as the literal bumps in the road I experienced driving the Northern SNE section from Massachusetts to Virginia last summer! (see my blog post: https://centralvermontrailway.blogspot.com/2023/07/a-new-addition-to-layout-part-2-voyage.html for more on that part of the adventure.  In this case the latest challenge was an intermittent short somewhere in the track or wiring. In the end I traced the issue to one or two of the turnouts - and/or their ..read more

I came up with the idea for my freelanced Southern New England Railway in conjunction with Iain Rive during one of his visits to Wisconsin. But not many people know that I had a "railroad of lies" long before the SNE named the Maryland & Ohio Railroad. I created the M&O when I was 10 or 11. As the name implies it was an Appalachian bridge route with lots of coal traffic. It had blue first generation diesels, and a lot of coal hoppers … I’ll let you guess which railroad may have heavily inspired the M&O… they say imitation is the sincerest form of flattery.  With the news tha ..read more

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Test fitting the background scenery foam panel. I think the road "extension" blends fairly well.  I haven't touched the northern SNE branch section for almost a month or more since I've been focusing on background scenery on the mainline "loop" around the room. But I'd made a bunch more trees, and I was getting sick of tripping over the two chunks of the mountain that we'd recovered from the helix move disaster - but the mountain chunks were useable even if looking a little dusty and faded.  We'd built a box framework section to fill the space between the main layout and th ..read more

  Lots of snow this week. And lots of tree making.  Flocked a bunch of Super Trees - most of them using a variation of one my favorite tree color blends: These will be getting "planted" (hopefully) this weekend.  ..read more

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 A quick review of 2023 on this blog.  Total unique page views (all time) sit at 1,124,248.  For 2023 there were 148,000 unique page views.  There were 748 posts in 2023, and in case you're curious here are the top ten posts for last year in terms of total views: IKEA Ivar Benchwork - User Report Posted by CVSNE 406  A couple of upcoming projects Posted by CVSNE 354  New Addition to the Layout - Part IV : Back on its own two (four) feet... Posted by CVSNE 279  Farewell to the "northern" SNE Posted by CVSNE 277  Wordless Wednesday #269 - Need t ..read more

After setting a record of not accomplishing anything on the layout for the last two months (holiday visitors, combined with a nasty head cold that I just couldn't shake for weeks...) I took some time between Christmas and New Years to get some additional scenery added to the layout.  Actually, I started out intending to do some sorting of the scenery material bins - in the end it seemed to make more sense - and sounded a lot more fun - to actually use the stuff on the layout rather than simply sort it and store it.  On a more pragmatic note, I also needed to get some step by step p ..read more

 As I've mentioned in the past, I've been pleased that model locomotive manufacturers (Atlas, Rapido, and Athearn) have all introduced factory painted models of Central Vermont diesels. (Although I wish one of them would do something in the post-1963 tapeworm scheme - on both the Battle Creek Blue and Red and Black variations!).  But I never thought I'd see anyone do a locomotive factory painted in my prototype freelance Southern New England Railway.  Let me clarify - this isn't some sort of freelanced roadname deal like Homeshops is doing.  These are legit prototype locomo ..read more