The North Dorset Mill

GT 7529 is spotting a flat car at the loading platform of the N.Dorset Mill

Finally Finished - The Old Mill Scene....by Don  Janes

     Quite a few years ago my good friend lou Sassi decided to move from New York to North Carolina.  Lou had a beautiful HO scale New England layout that had to come down.  Everything had to go because once he settled in his new home he was changing his modelling to On30.  Lou had several structures that I really wanted to have for my layout and the Martin Machine structure from South River Model Works was one of them.  Lou had built this kit for an MR product review but never put it on his layout.  We negotiated a price on this and another mill and I made the trip to New York State to pick up my purchases.  Once I got it home it sat in my basement until last fall when I finally had a spot to put it into my layout.  With the help of my friend Greg Rich from New Baltimore Mich. (I covered his layout on a previous blog post) I got the structure in place and decided how I hoped it would look when finished.  After almost a year of  working away at the scene, bit at a time I finally have it pretty well finished.  There is a little more scenery to do around the scene and more fine detail to add but overall it is done.

    Once I had the main mill in place with the pond and damn I realized I needed another mill type structure in the background to help fill out the scene so I built another SRMW kit I had on hand, Lamson and Goodson, and placed it behind the white mill. This new structure helped complete the mill complex and also hide the mainline track where it disappears into the wall.

    The mill is served by a rail siding which has a loading dock for boxcars and a concrete pad with a small crane for loading larger items onto flat cars or into gondolas.

     This was a fun project and I really learned a lot about rock work, water and making rapids. 

This view from below the dam shows the  dam and rocky river below it

The river that feeds the mill pond runs out of the woods in the background and a small wooden A frame bridge provides road access to the mill complex

Here we see the 7529 spotting a CV flatcar at the loading pad next to the small crane. The brick mill in the background hides the mainline where it passes through the wall.

Another view of the engine and crane and various levels of the mill

The river side view of the mill shows just how large of a structure it is.