Scattered Thoughts . . .

I had written a few blog entries about kitbashing this Bachmann Large Scale bobber caboose but I wanted to add a short blog entry just showing the 'before' and 'after' for a quick comparison... Here is a collage showing various angles of some of the new details on the newly rebuilt caboose...

I made a bit more progress on the caboose project for our garden railroad over the past few days.  I am definitely at a nice stopping point now.  I think I can call this little project "completed".  I'll probably change a few more things in the future but, for now, this project is done. Here is a photo, below, showing the 'before' version of this caboose when I first purchased it...  note that this caboose started life with only two axles and four wheels...  no window panes...  no lighting...  shiny molded plastic with molded-in color...   and, generally, very toy-like...  there really was nothing special nor attractive about it.  It didn't even roll well! My goal was to make it a bit more realistic-looking and I had a lot of ideas.   The first thing I wanted to do was to remove those two axles and replace them with two typical railroad trucks which would make it roll much more smooothly.  This required a lot of cutt...

I t rained all day yesterday (and I thought it was supposed to be a rainy day today too but the sun is shining at the moment...  but it is far too humid for me!) so I stayed indoors and did a little more work on the caboose for our garden railroad.   I cut some basswood to make small awnings for each of the windows on both sides of the caboose.  I carefully glued them in place.  I even painted them after gluing them in place.  It was an easy job but a little bit time consuming.   I feel this adds a bit of depth to the caboose.  It was looking quite flat before and lacking some sort of extra detail.  These awnings fit well.   It is a little easier to see in this photo, below, how I had roughed up the planking on the sides of the caboose the other day.  Before I had done this, the caboose was perfectly molded plastic on a perfectly flat plane.  Now the planking boards are a bit wonky making them look a bit worn which i...

I 've been down for a couple of weeks due to significant spinal pain so I've been taking things slow and easy.  While I've been mostly sedentary, I've been working on a caboose kitbash I've had planned for a few years.   Unfortunately, I never thought about capturing a photo of my caboose before I started cutting away parts of the caboose so the photo below is someone else's photo of the same exact caboose.   This caboose is what is known as a bobber caboose and these cabooses have the distinct characteristics of being very short in length and having only two fixed axles.  The first thing I wanted to change was this fixed two axle configuration.  This caboose never rolled well and it sometimes would derail on our small garden railroad.  I wanted to remove this whole undercarriage and install two typical railroad trucks with two axles each under this little caboose. In these photos, below, you can see that I now have two trucks under the caboose....

Although the lake house is fairly close to our home (only an hour away), it is still a bit isolated. Being isolated means that we must travel over to New Hampshire to do our food shopping. This is only a half hour away but it is still quite different than our usual five minutes to the market from our home in Waterbury so , whenever we are at the lake house, we plan a trip to Woodsville, NH before and after every weekend so we can refill our pantry and refrigerator.  Woodsville is a nice little town so we actually enjoy making this food run twice a week. Plus, the prices in Woodsville are only 50-60% of the prices in Waterbury where we usually shop and the quality of the produce is far better in Woodsville! So we actually enjoy this little excursion from the lake house. Here is a short two minute video of the kids in the back seat of the car on the way to Woodsville... it is abundantly clear that they really do enjoy this trip to Woodsville... no fighting (okay... there is ...