2011-The Year for HON30 on the MW&LG Ry

Posted on January 10, 2011 by mooreway

This year for Christmas I received one of the re-released BCH HOn30 Plymouth locomotive sets and an extra set of hopper cars.

I have wanted to do a micro layout in HOn30 for some time. This now gives me the perfect excuse to do just that.

I spent my spare time over the holidays exploring Carl Ardent’s micro layout site and found a lot of inspiration. I highly recommend the site.

At any rate I decided on a size of 18″ x 36″ with a mining theme.

Here is the rough draft for it I created quickly using sketchup.

The railroad will feature the lizard gulch mine and a low relief town  housed in a canyon on one side of the layout, and an ore processing plant on the other side of the layout with the company town of mooreway  located next to it, along with a small turn table and locomotive servicing shed of some sort. The feature I really like on the layout is the hidden 2 track transfer table that will allow the empty and full cars to be moved back and forth from plant to mine unseen by the observer making it so there is always a string of cars to pick up for some operations.

I am planning to go slow on this little layout, breaking it into small projects that I can work on in-between all the distractions that life with 5 children brings.  I plan to have it ready for a debut at the Nov 2011 Rocky Mountain Region NMRA Convention in Salt Lake City, later this year.

I will be starting with the transfer table design, since this is the major part of the layouts operations.

Posted in MooreWay & Lizard Gulch micro layout | Comments Off

Orange Autos T-trak Module Project

Posted on November 19, 2010 by mooreway

I am a member of the Color Country T-Trak Club that is based in Southern Utah.

This last spring I finished up one of my sets of corner modules. The idea started with a shipment of cars a friend of mine got that had a extra helping of Orange Cars in it. So I decided we needed a car dealership for our layout.

I started the project by drawing up the building in Sketchup and printing it out so I could see how it fit on the module.  It needed a little bit of resizing and this is what it looked like in Sketchup

I then prepared the sketchup file and exported it to be laser cut. This is what it looked like folded flat and ready to cut.

Next I took the parts I had laser cut from Matte Board and Card Stock and layed them out for assembly

all parts

The roof

The building.

Next I used my BevelMaster Jig to bevel or miter the corners of the parts to fit them together nicely

before bevel

after bevel

Next I assembled the roof and building and painted them leaving the top so it would come off.

I next put in the interior of the building, I wanted cars in my show room and shop

Then we added a sign and put things on the module.

and added some scenery

and last but not least is the credits photo… My Daughter is a big help with scenery and helped me to do alot of the work on these corner modules.

T-Trak is a great size for public displays and small home layouts and I enjoy the module projects I build in it.

Posted in T-Trak Modules | Comments Off

Blacksmith Car

Posted on November 2, 2010 by mooreway

Here are some pictures of a Blacksmith’s Saw and Ax Sharpening car I built a few years ago.

It received an NMRA Merit Award at the 2009 Wasatch Division Show.

It is constructed mainly from Ozark Miniatures casting parts and other items I found around the house when I was building it.

Posted in Rolling Stock | Comments Off