Easter break was a fun time, however, not a lot gone done on the layout.  OK, nothing got done except a little more clean up and organizing (and still more to do).  Good week with the kids off school, though.  My son is now (finally) riding a bike, so we did some biking and playing games and had a lot of fun.  

I planned to build a 3x9 layout that I had started a few years ago when space was tight at my old house.  I thought it would be a chainsaw layout now, so I was going to complete what I had started.  At each turn, though, I kept thinking that I wasn't going to get all I wanted to try into this plan, so I finally thought, "well, I have the room, I'll just add an extension."  The layout below was born...

I had an extended time off work this last while and was hoping to get a lot done on the railroad, but alas, life had different ideas.  It started out well enough.  I took my son to the model train show here in town last Saturday and we enjoyed that very much, then took the whole family on Sunday.  It was very enjoyable, I only wish I would have brought the camera along and did more of a report on it.  I had planned to give out some CD or DVDs with MRH stuff on it, but never got time to produce them.  I'm thinking I will aim for that at next year's sho

My daughter felt like being a photographer today with her camera, so I had her snap some pictures of our rolling stock and current state of our 3x9 layout.  She was quite into it, so I took a few of the best and put them on photobucket to post here.  This is the storage room and there is only one lightbulb in this area, so the lighting isn't good, but I'm in the middle of wiring in four more light fixtures for this area, so it will get much better. 

First, this is a picture of my locos, two box cars and three grain hoppers in various states of weathering. 

Its been a busy couple months and I haven't had a lot of hobby time.  Because I fly a lot, I bought several books, as I've mentioned in other threads, to read and try to learn more about operations and design.  Things are less cloudy, but I still don't feel confident in designing something that will be operationally pleasing.  I think researching a specific area and the operations that go on there would help, though, but I'm not sure where to start in that.  Google searches provide general information, but nothing in depth to provide much for industries and the

OK, the Ed Wood reference is actually Plan 9, but this is my Plan 1.  I'm guessing we could easily get to Plan 9 and beyond once I get some comments.  I figured out a fairly simple method for getting this out of XtrkCad, but it is fairly small.  We'll see how it looks on the page.  A little explanation, first.  This is the upper deck of a double-decker.  The "bottom&

I've read the first four chapters of Realistic Model Railroad Operation and with all the ideas that have been swimming around my head over the last few months, I thought it would be a good time to start brainstorming my givens and druthers.  I'm still not certain all my givens are actually givens and not druthers, but thought I should start somewhere and if I want to start a layout plan, I probably should have this done.  So here's what I've got so far:

I bought stuff I didn't need and won't get me any closer to my layout getting finished.  One of the things I really enjoy is passenger train travel.  I got my first ride in kindergarten on a field trip.  What could be better than that?  Best field trip I ever had in school.  I've been on the train several times since, and I always enjoyed watching the passenger train come through town when I was a kid.  It was the VIA rail train in blue with yellow lettering and stripes.  I've found models of these before, but I passed them up, either becaus

This will be the place I'll review my experiences with online hobby shops, with a distinctly Canadian perspective.  As I talked about in another thread, Canadian shoppers are a little more limited when it comes to shopping online, either because people won't ship here, will ship here at exorbitant prices or we just can't find the Canadian roads we're looking for because they just aren't stocked.  We have some Canadian hobby shops online, but I haven't yet found one that provides discounts like the American shops.

Yet I have so little of it.  I'm finding that one of my biggest issues to overcome is being patient.  I want to do everything and finish things as quickly as possible and move on to the next task.  I've been like that as long as I can remember.  It has its advantages and disadvantages.  In programming I think it was an advantage for the most part.  Once I had an algorithm, I could bang out code, test it and move on to the next project.  Not so much in my model railroading projects.  You can do little jobs and then generally you wait for something