Image of the Month

With 2011 being the 150th anniversary of the Civil War I wanted to show you this strange looking figure. If you click on the image can you guess what it is? It is railroad related that is certain.

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It is a Sherman Necktie. If you look very closely you can see this is a railroad rail that is wrapped tightly around a tree.

from Wiki....

Sherman's neckties were a phenomenon of the American Civil War. Named after Maj. Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman of the Union Army, Sherman's neckties were railway rails destroyed by heating them until they were malleable and twisting them into loops resembling neckties, often around trees. Since the Confederacy had limited supplies of iron, and few foundries to roll the rails, this destruction was very difficult to repair. They were also called Sherman's bow ties, Sherman's hairpins or Jeff Davis hairpins.

From My Workbench

 

This is the first posting I have had in a while, I have been totally slammed with building models for my RR club, we had a Narrow Gauge Mini Meet here in Dallas that was a total blast, and lastly prepping for the LSR convention next month. I will be giving a clinic on "Intro to scratch building structures". If anyone is interested in a pdf version of this please post a request with your email.

Anyway...I have been partnering with Bart at my railroad club to overall the lumber mill area of the layout. Bart is working the scenery aspect and I am tackling the structures. 

The first was a Master Creations Lumber Mill. If you have ever built a Master Creations kit, your up for a challenge. The kits that they produced were innovative, complex, and were limited. the challenge is the instructions are little hard to follow, and from a personal viewpoint, laser cut work from the perspective of its use in siding a structure, although looks great, I prefer to use board on board. With that said, 80% of this mill is scratch built. I used the framing, details and windows from the kit however replaced just about everything else. 

So if your up for a real challenge, try a Master Creations kit, you will have an unique structure.

The second structure is a BTS log dump, if your familiar with logging operations you know that these were used to remove the logs from the railroad car and dump them into a log pond. These ponds were staging areas for log to be fed into the mill using the log flume you see above.

BTS kits are really great, actually BTS is the same company as Master Creations. There kits are some of the best on the market today and reasonably priced as well. This was a fun kit and took about a weekend. 

 Well I am off to finish up my contest models for the convention. After that I will start with more logging "stuff".

Here is the BTS Website if your interested in some really cool and innovative product.