Chesapeake & Appalachian Railway

The Spring of 2007 saw much expansion on the CAR. I added 100 feet of mainline and a dozen switches. The new mainline expansion has two tunnels and a stone bridge with up to 3% grades. Tunnels are constructed of thin concrete blocks with cut slate portals. Retaining walls are a mix of natural stone, concrete wall blocks and pavers. A raised section of track (from the bridge to the inner tunnel) is ladder track construction of PVC Tufboard with PVC pipe supports and backfilled with gravel.

Construction pics -

Finished pics -

-Brian

My second city block is a combination storage chest with a city block of three buildings flats on front. The two buildings on the ends were created from a single Colorado Model Structures Virginia Ridge Variety Store kit. The middle building is scratch built of a pink foam board base covered with a Plastruct veneer.

-Brian

This locomotive kitbash comes from my love of small quirky locomotives. After seeing a few different scratchbuilt, kit, and bashed boxcab diesel models, one of the existing original boxcabs at the B&O museum, and spending a bit of time looking through all the great pics here - http://home.att.net/~Berliner-Ultrasonics/boxcabs.html, I found a few boxcabs to be used as the basis for my bash.

My boxcab kitbash is prototypically based on a Pennsy A6 two axle boxcab –

while taking a few elements (end platforms and doors) of this Jay Street Connecting RR boxcab –

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The Thurmont freight house is an old Lindbergh kit I picked up on eBay. It was not intended to be an outdoor structure but after some internal structural reinforcement, a few coats of paint and clear coat, and a few signs, its does just fine outdoors. It sits on an old broken marble slab found in our backyard when we moved in.

-Brian

The Soggy Bottom coal mine is a small coal tipple moving big hunks of anthracite coal. The CAR is the primary mover of the coal.
The tipple itself is a box of 1″x6″ pressure treated pine and conveyor shaft ripped down from a 4″x4″. It is covered with 1/2″ wide cedar boards. The trim and supports are also cedar. The windows are hardware cloth over gloss black paint. The roof is coroplast covered with corrugated aluminum, annealed and painted (from soda cans and run through a paper crimper).

Construction pix -

and on the layout -

-Brian