by Jamie | Mar 11, 2014 | Modutrak News
Once again we took a little time out this holiday season and took some video of the layout. Hope you enjoy it! ...
by Jamie | Sep 3, 2010 | Our Layout
Originally this plan started out as a quest for some generic scenery to provide running space between key scenes on the layout like Sturtevant, New Lisbon, Wisconsin Dells and others. We figured that typical Midwestern scenery would be easy – some taller grass, maybe some farm scenery, sprinkle in a few trees and a creek here or there and we’d be golden! Well building something generic isn’t how Modutrak group-think goes – a prototype would be a “more ideal” so says the group. So a discussion started and Keith Kohlman provided the following prototype track diagram from the 1950’s that shows the Milwaukee Road trackage from Franksville, Wisconsin to Caledonia Wisconsin: Closer inspection reveals a fair amount of interesting stuff going on here. There are two passing sidings between the two towns, a series of crossovers, some industry sidings, a couple of depots, a stream crossing or two and a few grade-level crossings. Very quickly this started to look interesting to the group and a series of old photographs came out of storage revealing more and more about the area. Here is a photo of the depot at Caledonia taken some time in the late 1950’s: Caledonia was mostly a farm and dairy community (and still is) and the depot provided a means to get milk out the larger cities, not to mention supplies that were regularly dropped off at the industry siding directly across the tracks from the depot. Plus being between Chicago and Milwaukee it was also a passenger stop between the two cities. The depot and passing siding are no longer there today. These two modules...
by Jamie | Sep 3, 2010 | Gallery, Modutrak News
Modutrak displayed for the first time at the 2010 National Train Show in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. We had our largest ever layout at this show consuming a 50×60 foot area. Shows like this are always special as we get to see a lot of old friends, make some new ones and overall take in a great atmosphere. Thanks to everyone that stopped by to chat and have a look around – your kind words of encouragement always mean a lot to us. The rest of the summer will be a break for us till October when we display at the Railroad Prototype Modelers show in Naperville, Illinois. Meanwhile here are a few photos we took at the...
by Jamie | Sep 2, 2010 | Our Layout
A portion of the modutrak layout models the Milwaukee Road from Chicago, Illinois to Milwaukee, Wisconsin set in the 1950’s (give or take). Franksville, Wisconsin is 30 minutes north of the Wisconsin/Illinois border and as you can see from the 1950-era photo above, it was a booming little town with thriving railroad access. The town included the Franksville depot, two grain/feed businesses that included coal storage, a lumber yard, and two oil storage/delivery facilities. The industry siding and several of the businesses are no longer in Franksville, but the remnants are still visible making this a fun project to research and build. Here is the track plan for the two modules: Here is what an aerial view of Franksville looks like today: These two modules are still currently under construction but you can find a gallery of ongoing progress below. ...
by Jamie | Sep 1, 2010 | Gallery, Modutrak News
Every year during the Christmas to New Year’s holidays we set up a portion of our modular layout for a few weeks to “run some trains”. In addition to just being an excuse for most of us to get together and have a little fun on our own we also try and capture a few images from around the layout. Well last year we decided to play around with a new digitial SLR (Nikon D300S) that has an HD video camera function to capture the current state (back then) of the n-scale Modutrak layout. We stitched together several clips of video we shot throughout the day and humbly present it below: N-Scale modutrak 2009 Year in Review from modutrak on Vimeo. For those that are curious about the technical details, we recorded most of this on a Nikon D300S at 720p. Using a digital SLR means you can use a variety of different lens and produce something that looks more like professional film. That said, recording anything this small and closeup resulted in compromises mostly in depth-of-field issues. Stopping down the lens helps, but introduces more visible noise to the movie due to the low light levels. We used a bank of florescent studio lights with three layers of orange filter gel on them to create the late afternoon sun look. We edited the video with Final Cut Pro and did color grading in Color (exposure, color correction, saturation, sky shading and more were manipulated). We learned a lot and hope you enjoy...
