Having fun making decisions…

There is a childlike innocence in modelling prototypes we are less familiar with - and despite my best endeavours I’m still wonderfully uninformed about so much about Canadian railways in the prairies during the late 70s and 80s… 

I read books and look on the internet. I absorb as much as I can but there are so many gaps…

I want to give my ridiculously caricatured Walthers grain elevator some presence, a sense of place. A mixture of memory and cliche, Lochdubh for the same reason… Saskatchewan for another…

Elevators were painted and repainted over their existence. Some lasted in old paint longer than you might expect. I remember and have photos of the later (right) style of Pool logo, but somehow, it doesn’t sit right…

Photos of Carlton and elsewhere in the pages of Greg McDonnell’s seminal ‘Signatures of Steel’ show a simpler, plainer style - which looks familiar yet isn’t. It fits, it feels better on the reduced mass of the smaller elevator (above) where the logo only seems to accentuate the compromise.

So decision made, the older style it is - and for good measure a set of renumbering and HMLX markings for the GP20… for whilst this whole Canadian N scale adventure is following some sort of familiar path, it is also about having fun, and about what feels right.

Until next time, more soon…

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