Progress at Milton

Looking a Milton from the south, the town is arranged along the east side of the town plaza with the warehouses on the west side. The Masonic Lodge looms over the entire scene.

After several months of structure and scenery construction, Milton is starting to look like a town rather than a bare piece of plywood. So far, there are 17 structures which have been built, only one of which was from a kit. That was only because I had no pictures of the building and the kit was the right size.
 

Looking north up the main street, the Milton Hotel is on the right with the Peterson & Dake store on the left. Stores, barber shop, saloons and a livery stable are all present. Church's Mineral Springs was a hot springs in the area.

 It was a challenge to build a whole town to scale but rewarding for me. The only thing out of scale was the depth of the scene looking from the aisle. I just did not have quite enough depth but it isn't real apparent unless you study old pictures or have visited the actual location. The structures were styrene with Grandt or Tichy windows and doors. Dimensions were taken from Sanborn insurance maps of the town. Building colors were a little trickier. I had to take educated guesses based on the varying shades of gray from the old photos and compare that with other pictures taken with the blue sensitive film of the day. The names of the establishments were taken either from photos or the town directory of the 1890s.

The Tornado Hotel was named for an 1873 tornado which ran through town and turned the under-
construction hotel on the foundation. The owner finished the building and named it accordingly.

   On the prototype, Milton was the end of the line and almost all of the goods traveling to the gold country passed over the rails to end up here. Freight wagons carried the goods to the places like Angel's Camp, San Andreas, Altaville, Sonora, Columbia and Jamestown. The large Masonic hall on the hill was the dominant building in the town and lasted until January 2016 when it burned. It was the last remaining structure in the town which was there when the railroad existed.
 

An overall view of the town looking from the north. All of the platforms need some "set decoration" and the streets need wagons. The Tornado Hotel is just out of the picture to the left.

 There is still a lot of work to be done to build a turntable, stock pen, livery stable and blacksmith shop as well as stock the loading platforms with goods and the streets with wagons and buggies.