36 http://www.ModelRailroader.comow do you build a model
railroad when your chosen
subject has few commercial
products to ease the task?
That was the question I asked myself
when planning my Aquia Line O scale
railroad based on an unusual, but fasci-
nating subject – the United States
Military RR (USMRR) during the
U.S. Civil War. The answer came fromsome of the latest technology that’s now
available to model railroaders, including
laser cutting, photo-etching, 3-D print-
ing, battery-powered Digital Command
Control (DCC), and microcontrollers.
Even if you’re not planning an early
steam-era railroad, read on. The high-
tech tools and techniques that I describe
are sure to be helpful to your projects
regardless of the time period modeled.Why model the Civil War?
The first question you might ask is,
why build a model railroad with a Civil
War theme? As a child growing up in
New York City in the 1950s, the Civil
War was ancient history, overshadowed
by my parent’s experiences in the Great
Depression and World War II. Their sto-
ries of those events sparked my interest