Direct Rail Services 66431 leads train 4M07, the Tilbury2 Container to Daventry Drs (Tesco) container service seen passing through Willesden Junction in Northwest London. This is the first time in all the trips I’ve made to the UK where I’ve tried to get out and shoot a goods train. So success on the last full day of our vacation. 66431 is a Class 66/4 locomotive, built in 2008 by General Motors EMD in London Ontario, so a little bit of Canada in my English train chasing ..read more

Back in December when Rapido announced they would be producing Toronto’s first subway cars, I posted about how it was putting away another one of my long lingering projects in 3D printing the TTC”s first subway cars, the Gloucester Cars built in England that opened the subway 70 years ago in 1954. As I’ve said before, I am easily distracted some days. I’ll just leave this here, but I drew a sketch of another bookcase model that would accommodate not only the TTC Subway cars, but other equipment that would have overlapped with them in their lifetimes at Toronto’s Union Station ..read more

Ex-British Railways “West Country” pacific 34028 “Eddystone” steams north from Corfe Castle station, past the ruin of Corfe Castle toward Norden on the Swanage Railway in England. Not a bad way to start vacation! Droney didn’t like the winds though, was at “land me before I crash” warnings ..read more

When I paved my layouts roads, I used drywall filler for the asphalt. It was tinted grey with acrylic paint, so that if it got cut or damaged, it wouldn’t be bright white, it also meant, that I could defer actually painting the roads for a while. As with everything, all tasks eventually come due. Recently, I had the PanPastels out for something else, and decided to take a hack at the first bit of road to see how they adhered to my surface, and what they looked like. I have used PanPastels for road surfaces before, but never in the size and scope of the layout, and always with smoother starting ..read more

Time changes all, and the more things change, the more they stay the same. The image on the left was taken by the late Roger Puta in October 1980, showing VIA FPA-4 6760 heading west approaching the Newtonville Road bridge. On the right, is VIA Venture Cab Car 2310 being propelled west by Charger locomotive 2210 as Train 643 on April 1, 2024 in as close to the same place and angle as I could get. Gone are the blue and yellow, loco hauled coaches, jointed rail. In is a semi permanent coupled set, two tone gray, continuously welded rails, and almost 44 years of growth along the line side. The m ..read more

I have not been, if I am being honest, historically interested in riding trains just to say I have taken them somewhere, or ridden certain lines. I have many friends who do, and who have. I started doing it last year with trips to Sudbury for the Sudbury-White River VIA Rail and then Cochrane for the Cochrane-Moosonee Ontario Northland. There are lots of lines in and around Toronto I haven’t ridden. Many of them have GO Trains, but without two-way service, I’d have to drive to the suburbs early in the morning to get on, or take the train out in the evening and bus back, not overly attractive p ..read more

More Burlington Northern in the Canadian Countryside! The 2023 Southern Ontario Railfan hunt for BNSF GP38-2’s on loan to Canadian National continues in 2024. A pair of BNSF GP38-2’s is seen here headed west from Kitchener leading L568 to Stratford. The units 2090 in Orange & Green “Heritage 1” and 2926 in “white face” cascade green with a Burlington Northern logo still on the nose lead a positively boring CN unit 7521. Who knows how long these oddballs from another time and the other end of the continent will be here in Ontario, so catch them while you can ..read more

One of the nice things about early 20th century industrial buildings is that even the most simple buildings in terms of purpose were often built with great care and thought to their architectural details. This makes modelling them a fun challenge, as there are a lot of trim and details to recreate and paint. At a certain point, you can only do so much with airbrushing, sooner or later, you need to get down and dirty with fine paint brushes, and eventually powders to finish making the buildings look real and a part of the landscape. With this in mind, last weekend while watching the 12 hours of ..read more

1955 meet 2024. VIA Rail Park Car Glacier Park sits near Venture Cab Car 2311 at VIA Rail’s Toronto Maintenance Centre on a Tuesday evening after the Canadian set arrived. The Venture set is in Southern Ontario for testing, having headed west to London the next day ..read more

Sometimes I can be slow at stuff. The Hydro and light poles that run along Liberty Street on my layout have been in a grey undercoat for 3 plus years at this point! This past week, I finally got out the burnt umber paint and did some dry brushing to give them a more brown tint. Sooner or later I will go over them really fine with some white paint to soften the brown, but even a quick hour at the bench to do the poles in brown has changed the appearance of the layout when you look down the street. A quick dry brush of the hydro poles changes the look of the layout greatly. I still need to ..read more