Cheap & Easy Guide to Model Railroading: Popular Posts from 2013

Making easy pulpwood loads--a popular post in 2013.

I was looking over stats from the past year, and was surprised to find that three older posts were among the more popular articles on the blog.

One of them was about making pulpwood loads; the other about making coal loads; and the third about making cork roadbed.

All three had a common word in the title: Easy. Maybe that's why they were so popular!

In the post about log loads, I described how I used home-grown grape ivy to make realistic loads for Roundhouse flat cars and Walther's log cars.

In the post about coal loads, I described how I used a leftover foam from a mattress cover to make realistic coal loads.

In the post about cork roadbed, I described how I used inexpensive (compared to model railroad prices) sheet cork from home improvement stores to make good looking cork roadbed.

One post with the word "easy" in the title that didn't get as much traffic was about making easy numberboards for locomotives using standard word processing programs. With so many locomotives coming ready to run these days, that's not surprising; fewer modellers actually need to make their own numberboards anymore.

Other posts describing what I consider to be easy ways of making a good-looking layout include using various weeds and shrubs to make trees; using paint and glass medium to make water;  using fridge magnets to make a dispatcher's panel; and an easy way to make realistic building interiors using photos from real windows.

One thing all these methods also have in common is they are cheap; almost anything a model railroader wants these days can be had--for a price. Which is OK if you have the money, which not everyone does.

For the rest of us, maybe that's what we need: A blog titled The Cheap and Easy Guide to Model Railroading. It might be very popular!