A New Modelling Season...

I'm glad to announce we had our first true club meeting since we took a summer break a few months ago. While renovations aren't completed in Louis-Marie home, we still can work on the smaller room aka Villeneuve and D'Estimauville.

Nothing is scheduled, but work on the cement plant is going to take priority. I didn't draw anything yet, but I have a design in my head that should make operation, maintenance and detailing easier than our first attempt.

Among other projects are completing the grade crossing signals and implementing ambiant sound. Louis-Marie already have the parts and a good idea how he will tackle the challenge. I trust him to make something amazing out of nothing as he always does.

As for Jérôme, he is urging me to put my effort on Temiscouata when the time will come. Some new pictures where recently published in a local magazine (Groupe TRAQ) that shed a new light on Connors Branch and its peculiar junction with NTR/CNR. We also discussed several other ideas, but I guess he's again right on this one. From experience, I know his guts generally are trustworthy. But it will be a long shot before I can start to build anything.

Meanwhile, I'm already working on some experimental layout. For those who once followed my Quebec South Shore Project, just keep in mind it is an expansion around this concept with a similar theme and setting (CP Rail's Quebec branchline in the 1980s in an agricultural community). This time, the track plan takes in account several aspects I covered in the Thinking Out Loud series. Speaking of it, I still have a few draft about articles but I don't know if I'll publish them. For the moment, this small project is gonna stay "secret" since it is highly experimental and could truly shock some peoples! If the results are worthy of publication, you'll see it, if not, it will join the numerous junked layout remains filling up my damp basement! Once again, it is testing ground to build up some skills before trying them on Hedley-Junction.

The Grand Trunk locomotive project and decals, it is on hold for a while. On a good note, I got the missing brass parts required to complete the locomotives, namely the pumps, pilot and spoked pilot wheelset. This autumn will be quite frankly busy with professional and academic projects thus I can't promise anything. Knowing myself, it will be probably done during Christmas vacations when I have a lot of free time to immerse myself in modelling.

As for the people who followed the Thinking Out Loud series this summer and enlighted me with their experience and advices, I wish to thanks them a lot. It is evident a substantial amount of people are working on interesting concept and pushing their hobbies to higher levels. Sharing is a part of that movement and it was truly a pleasure to see my personnal journey is no longer a matter of thinking I'm an isolated weirdo not jumping into the bandwagon!