Monthly Archives: March 2020

Dog Days of Spring

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We added a few additional touches to the dog park:

– Used some inexpensive LED string lights. I just cut off the battery pack and wired them in to my layout DC source. The batteries included with the string lights were 2 x CR2032 3V but my DC source on the layout is 4.5V. The wires were originally silver, so I painted them black with some acrylic paint

– Used some bamboo grill sticks for the light supports, just cut them to length and painted them black

– Picked up a few Arttista dog figures to populate the park

We still need to add a few additional details, but we may wait until we purchase a 3D printer:

  • Trash Cans
  • Dog poop
  • Water Bowl
  • Benches

Trees in Bloom

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Spring has sprung in Slottown – this past weekend, in the spirit of “Social Distancing” due to these unprecedented times and because we finally got some clear weather to use our Scenic Express Super Trees starter kit to make some trees –

Modern power on the mains moving past the station platform
The Amtrak Piedmont rolls past some rose bushes
Some top-notch residential landscaping
Future dog park (currently unoccupied)

The fences are the new Woodland Scenics fencing system which we painted black for the dog park.

We have lots of “flock” and “realistic leaves” left over, so I’ve put an order in for some Sedum “Autumn Glory” seeds which we’ll plant this weekend. Come fall, we should be able to harvest the dried flowers to make more trees.

All in all, the O Scale layout is shaping up – we still have the downtown area to apply scenery, then finally add some road signs and maybe telephone poles (undecided on the latter due to the finicky nature).

Stone Mountain and Christmas in Canada

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We popped by Legacy Station this weekend to pickup our pre-ordered MTH Railking Stone Mountain Railroad GP9 and ended up with a few more items we just couldn’t say no to.

The Stone Mountain Railroad was an iconic part of my childhood, as it’s a small tourist railroad that runs around the geographic landmark of “Stone Mountain” (made famous in more recent years by “Kenneth” from 30 Rock). As such, we had to have a model of it on Slottown! The model is par for the course for MTH Railking scale – what exceeded our expectations was the clarity and depth of sound – it sounds better than so some of our older PS3 locomotives

In addition to the new locomotive, we added a few other items:

Woodland scenics new fencing protecting our station’s parking lot
Woodland Scenics watertower to give Slottown Citizens fresh drinking water
Canadian Pacific Holiday Train

We continue to work on scenery and ground cover – if we can get a few days of clear weather we’ll get to making some new trees (since our Scenic Express tree kit requires we spray glue outside)