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Maritime Madness
After our disappointing visit to Searsport on Friday, it was very refreshing today to find the Maine Maritime Museum in Bath. The museum is a wealth of information on ship-building in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. I picked up a couple of books, and took several photographs, including this one of an HO scale model of a turn-of-the-century shipyard that was in Bath (the museum is situated on the original site, and features restored buildings from two shipyards).
We didn’t have time to go through the entire museum, but we’ll make a point of spending a couple of days at the museum on our next visit to Maine.
Posted in Inspiration, Research
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Site Updates
I’ve been fooling around fixing things that broke when I updated to the new version of WordPress a couple of weeks ago. Most importantly, the links and comment pages are working again, and the site has a new “look.” This one’s a little cleaner, and will have an appropriate graphic header “soon.” If it looks appropriate when you read this, then “soon” has happened.
Posted in Miscellaneous
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Troels Kirk on Facebook
Troels Kirk, an incredible modeler from Sweden, has a page for his railroad on Facebook.
Posted in Inspiration
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New Schooner for Searsport
While traveling from Bar Harbor down to Rockland, ME today, we rolled through Searsport, ME, and stopped at the home of Blue Jacket Shipcrafters. We picked out a nice model of a Friendship Sloop for our living room, and Donna bought me a beautiful kit of an 1877 New England Schooner. It will make a lovely addition to the town of Searsport on the Corinna & Searsport.
We also spent some time poking around Searsport. It’s amazing that almost no evidence of the once major shipbuilding industry remains. I did find one original looking boat shed and some evidence of the marine railway that used to serve it.
Many of the buildings in the town of Searsport are intact, based in the few pictures I’ve been able to find. Of the nine shipyards once in operation in Searsport, I could find obvious remains of only two — maybe three. Searsport was once the busiest port and shipbuilding center in all of Maine, but it is curiously un-documented, unlike other ports such as Rockland.
On another interesting note, there’s a print on the wall in our room that shows the two four-masted schooners (Hester and Luther) that were brought to Wiscasset in 1932 by Frank Winter, who was owner of the WW&F at the time. The ships languished after the railroad’s demise in the mid-thirties, and were finally removed in 1998. (more details on the Hester and Luther can be found here).
Posted in Research, Structures and Scenery, Suppliers
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Poppin’ and Droppin’ at Kimberton
Some time ago, I commented that the idea of using fomecore as a roadbed material was not as successful as I’d hoped it would be. Unfortunately, I was not able to show a really good picture of just what went wrong. However, after an unfortunate incident this past weekend at Kimberton involving the module, a small girl and the concrete floor, I’ve got a great shot to illustrate the problem. (For those keeping score, the floor won, the little girl came in second, and the module lost).
Warped Fomecore roadbed
Anyway, despite having applied a layer of glue across the full surface of the sheet, it is pulling away from the plywood sub-roadbed. The plan to correct the issue is a two-parter. First, I’m going to try using staples to hold the foam down. Then I’ll re-scenic around the foam.
I took a few pictures at the show, which you can see here.
Kimberton was nice and relaxed — a little smaller than previous years. I didn’t pick up much, except for a few pairs of SR&RL freight car trucks, and a couple of really nice older books on the WW&F — Big Dreams and Little Wheels by Ruby Crosby Wiggin and The WW&F Two-Footer by Clinton F. Thurlow. The both contain some info and photographs I hadn’t seen before, and the price was great.
We debuted a few new modules this time around. The modules that Sean Heath and I built as Maryland Minibunch modules some years back came back to me from John Weigel’s layout a couple weeks back, and Kevin Hunter and I built some new legs for them and we got them running for the weekend. The still need a bit of renovation, but they did generate a lot of interest.
Kevin Hunter and I drove up together with our modules. I recently put a hitch on the van, and used it to haul all of our stuff. The old van took us up there just fine — almost. Just about 15 minutes before we arrived, it started misfiring. I called the local Ford dealer to see about it getting fixed, but they didn’t have parts, and were completely booked. In any event, the van got us home just fine, so I’ll take it in next week.
In other news, Corinna & Southern Forneys #9 and #10 have been sent to the Big Horn & Moose Drool shops for a little dress-up. Other locos will be following as time permits.
Posted in Design and Construction, Locomotives and Rolling Stock, Modular
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