Snapshot Sunday - #9

Milwaukee Road stock car waiting to be loaded at Martinsdale, Montana in the early 70’s.

Layout Construction - #21

Where’s the Beef?
Now that the grain elevator in Geraldine is done it’s time to move onto a new industry. Next on the list is a stock yard. The Walthers stock yard kit is designed to make one larger stock yard or two smaller ones. Splitting the kit into two yards is ideal solution for my layout. The first half of the kit was assembled and placed in Denton. For Geraldine, the fence layout needed to be rearranged to fit the location. This meant a complete re-think of the kit instructions. To start, I needed a base that I could assemble the fences on. The base is a sheet of .20” styrene sheet that has been painted with my standard earth color. The fence line was laid out with pencil starting from the track side loading ramp. From there it was just a matter of finding and fitting the pieces together like a puzzle. As a new fence or gate piece was added, I would scrape a small section of the paint to expose the styrene. This allowed a strong bond for the glue. The next step will be to weather the stock yard to look like a well used aging structure and add the dirt plus few weeds. The last step will be adding a street light next the fence by the vehicle loading ramp for late night unloading.

Snapshot Sunday - #8

Speeder at Martinsdale, Montana on the Milwaukee Road mainline in the mid 1970’s.