Raton Past

Nice! I look forward to seeing more photos and information.

Thanks! Of course many more photos will be coming in due time, this is just a little teaser to see if there is any interest. The layout is essentially a love letter to the ATSF over Raton Pass, and while it’s not too big, it depicts part of Wootton Ranch and both of the tunnels with scale portals. More to come soon once the structures are in.

I promise more to come. I want to have the layout essentially finished before the reveal, but in the meantime I’m excited to be able to run trains in fully-realized scenery.

I want to finish my little corner of Wootton Ranch, and finish the 3100 class oil-burning mikado I’m building before we do the glamor shots. The AZL mikado is close to the 3100 class Mikados the ATSF operated into the 1950s. My model depicts 3122 in her pre-1941 fit, as she appeared operating in the Albuquerque area. The 3100s were refit in the early 40s and these changes take them much farther from their USRA looks. The ATSF never had USRA mikados but if you squint, the 3100s were close. My model of 3122 will be hauling coal out of the Morley mine.

The layout features full sound, day and night lighting, and even a thunderstorm, which is very common during the summer in the Raton area. There will be other lighting and sound effects as well. Of course full videos will be coming along later if there is any interest.

Until then, here is a photo of the El Capitan approaching the tunnel. It’s the summer of 1956, and the El Capitan is in her first few weeks of operation. By all accounts, she’s a big hit.





I’ve always had a huge love for model railroading, it was really my first love. Many years ago I transitioned to ship modeling, which has really been my primary passion for the past couple decades. I build all of my ships completely from scratch, using only European boxwood and brass. My most recent model, pictured below, is just over 5 inches long, and contains over 2,500 individual pieces of photo etched brass alone. Of course I do all of the photo etch myself, from design to manufacture. The model took over a year to build, and depicts the Japanese battleship Kongo in her early 1944 fit. To say that I love small models is an understatement! So Z scale fits right in!

Thanks!

Most of my ships are in 1/1500 scale, but a few slip through at larger scales. One of my rules is absolutely NO commercial parts are used in my ship models. I’m even to the point of mixing my own paint from original recipes. A few of my works have won international art awards as well, but in the end it’s pure passion. Each ship starts with a block of European boxwood and a few sheets of brass.

The coin, by the way, is exactly 1 inch in diameter, or 25mm in new money.

My model of HMAV Bounty contains around 2000 treenails holding her hundreds and hundreds of planks to the hull. The model depicts the ship as she would have appeared arriving in Tahiti, and took nearly a year and a half to build. The rigging is braided copper wire, in 7 gauges, in order to depict the different types and thicknesses of the rigging. I use a custom built ropewalk to braid the wire, it’s quite a little feat of engineering in itself.

The quality of the photos has been artificially degraded as a few commercial folks have stolen the photos for advertising purposes in the past. The watermarks with my website help, but I’ve seen them photoshopped out. Sadly these are the highest quality photos I dare post online. I’ve even had people steal my photos and put their names on them! I don’t know what folks get out of that, but passing off my work as theirs has happened probably 4 or 5 times now. I’m extremely well known in ship modeling circles so that nonsense gets swatted down quickly, and the guilty party sulks away. Very odd behavior!

Thank you!

Whoa, if you put that much detail on your ship models, then your layout must be amazing. 

Looks really good!

-Eino