Mr Demille, I'm ready for my close up,

Kent and Ben getting a lay of the land to plan their shots.

Kent Johnson and Ben Lake from Model Railroader Video Plus visited the the USMRR Aquia Line today.  They are in town this week to shoot some local Capital-area layouts.

They spent the good part of the day shooting video of the USMRR Aquia Line and PoLA layouts. The  finished video will be used in a layout tour feature on the Model Railroader Video Plus website. Model Railroader Video Plus is a subscription based service that features dozens of model railroad videos ranging from how-tos to layout tours. I believe this was the first civil war era layout they visited.

Ben behind the big video camera

It was a lot of fun, but a lot of work too. We shot a variety of trains running up and down the line. We even did a short how-to video on converting figures to the Civil War period.

Meanwhile, Kent shoots some B-roll footage.

The layout ran very well. The engine Whiton did yeoman's work. Its battery held up all day. Engine McCallum also got in a workout. Engine Fury makes a brief appearance on the turntable at Falmouth. Yes, BG General Haupt did make an appearance to do the intro.


In addition to the normal video, they shot a time lapse of the whole video process. At one point you'll see Ben sitting on the floor wrestling with my Manfrotto tripod ball head. For some off reason, it decided to permanently attach itself to Ben's handy cam. We did eventually get them separated by taking the ball head apart and the camera base plate off.

Near the end of the day we took some video of a BNSF freight working on PoLA layout as a work in progress.

I am looking forward to seeing how the video turns out

Kent looks dashing in my brigadier's  uniform. It fits him
better than it fits me.

Ben tries to figure out how his Sony Handicam swallowed my
 tripod ball head. We did eventually get it apart.

And yes, we learned that driving a manual transmission with the parking brake on is a no go.