I have four certificates necessary for my Master Model Railroader award already and 3 more well underway. However, while cleaning up my workbench I stumbled on my Albany Tomato Company building which was about 70% complete. Since I had no room for it on my layout, I had shelved the project. For various reasons I decided to dig it out and work on it again and in the process started thinking about working on the "Structures" MMR certificate.
It is funny how quickly I become passionate about something. Less than a month ago, while dining with a friend and discussing the MMR program, I told him I was not going to go for Structures because I didn't want to spend time building lot of things that would just sit around and collect dust. And yet here I am, already starting to work on it. Don't ask me why.
One friend and excellent structure modeler is Mike Hachey, a fellow NMRA Division member. Constructing structures is his favorite part of the hobby, and it is no joke to say he is building a layout just to display them. And they are beautiful works of art. All of the pictures in this post are from a visit to his layout a couple of years ago. He has so many that in places they are just piled up, waiting to be integrated into the layout!
The requirements are on the NMRA's website but essentially you need to build 12 structures, with at least 6 scratchbuilt, of various styles. At least six of them must earn 87.5 merit points and at least one must be of some sort of bridge. There are other details, but that is the basic requirements of the award. Almost all of the structures on my layout are or will be scratchbuilt but none would qualify for the certificate. That is because most are truncated at the edge of the layout which makes them "partial structures", and I am also using a lot of commercial castings and omitting some details in the back that can't be seen. So, any buildings I use for my MMR award will be stand-alone structures that will otherwise live in a display case. But I am okay with that.
There are lots of things I want to build, and I really want to push myself and learn new skills. For example, I want to build one model out of wood instead of styrene, and I want to make another by casting plaster either for wall pieces or as one unit. I want to build models following articles from Michael Tylick and Lee Vande Visse, my two favorite authors as a kid. I want to use the plans from Harold Russell, the prolific draftsman who has done tons of drawings for Model Railroader. I want to do something related to the Arcade and Attica Railroad. It would be neat to do a barn or something farm related as my wife's family owns several farms. A church would be nice too, as my Christian faith is very important to me. And while most will be in HO scale, doing something in a different scale would be a pleasant diversion. That is quite a crazy set of druthers.
Thankfully, I have lots of old train magazines, many of which were purchased by my parents for me. I sat down one day and went through every issue and wrote down a list of scratchbuilding articles with plans that interested me and fit into the categories above, and ended up with 66 ideas total from 1988 through 2017. So, I have plenty of fodder to work from.
But I need to work on my Albany Tomato Company first before starting something new. So, for now I will just start making plans. But, the "local" NMRA Regional Convention is in early October and I would like to have some structures to enter (as well as my scratchbuilt freight cars built last year) so there will be no sitting around.
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