About Merrimack Valley Railroad

Merrimack Valley Railroad is a place to document ideas, prototypes, and model railroad work in progress. It’s meant to be a working notebook more than a finished showcase; a space to explore techniques, test concepts, and think through what makes a scene feel believable and immersive.

I’m Michael Peters Bond, and I’ve been into model trains since I was about two years old. In 2017, after buying my first house in Newburyport, Massachusetts; at the mouth of the Merrimack River in the Merrimack Valley; I started using the name Merrimack Valley Railroad as a way to frame my own railroad thinking and experimentation.

My interests lean heavily toward detail, immersion, and animation, rather than simply running trains in continuous loops. I’m more interested in how a scene reads, how light behaves, how structures and infrastructure relate to one another, and how small details contribute to a sense of place. For me, the satisfaction comes from building environments that feel lived-in and intentional.

That focus on detail eventually led me to resin 3D printing in 2019. I started designing and printing parts to fill gaps I couldn’t easily solve with off-the-shelf models, which later grew into a separate shop, Merrimack Valley Models. While that work lives elsewhere, the same mindset carries through everything documented here.

This site exists to capture the process: early ideas, prototypes, small test scenes, lighting experiments, and model-building techniques — including things that don’t work as planned. Over time, it will also document the development of a layout, but the emphasis will remain on learning, testing, and refining rather than rushing toward a finished result.

Posts here may take the form of written notes, photo-heavy walkthroughs, embedded videos, or simple observations from the workbench. The pace will reflect the reality of building; sometimes slow, sometimes quiet, always incremental.

If you enjoy thoughtful, detail-driven model railroading and don’t mind seeing things mid-stream, this site is meant to feel like a comfortable place to follow along.

— Michael