Canyon Road Diorama

While my layout of Liberty Village is my primary project, it is a long term one that is closing in on 3 years of progress, and probably has at least that much to go before its anything approaching “done”. Building a layout is a long term project, and sometimes I find I need smaller more, achievable projects to build skills, keep me motivated, and provide distraction from feeling bogged down on the layout, as even a small layout is a big project.

I’d been thinking for a while about needing a new portable photo stage, and late in 2020 I visited Canyon Road in Milton on the Canadian Pacific Railway’s Galt Subdivision between Toronto and Cambridge. I had wanted to get a shot of a train passing under this wooden farm bridge for years, and since October 2020, I have on a number of occasions in different light and weather conditions. I was also quite smitten with the view and it peculated for a few months, before I finally decided to pull the trigger and build an IKEA Billy Bookcase shelf sized diorama of Canyon Road. This would give me a chance to work on some scenery that is very different from Liberty Village, to stretch skills I am learning from the layout, and continue to try new things with working lit signals. I look forward to sharing it with you as it progresses.

CPR Train #147 climbing the hill westbound at Mile 37 on the Galt Subdivision beneath the wooden farm bridge. My inspiration for the “Canyon Road Diorama”.

So, this page will be a history of this project, and collect the posts together in a list for anyone interested in going through them all as I move along with this project.

At the “Finish” line on February 12, 2022. Very much generating the look and feel I wanted when I set out on this project.
From Sketch (February 7, 2021) to Reality (February 12, 2022)