9172 in April 2019.  only took 31 years...

9198 in November 2019.  I always say I work at glacial speed.

While attending Supertrain in Calgary Alberta this past weekend (http://supertrain.ca) I had opportunity to visit and operate on Dave Bedard's Canadian Pacific Esquimalt and Nanaimo Railway.  The E&N operates on Vancouver Island between Victoria and Courtney, with a branchline to Port Alberni.  Dave's layout features scratchbuilt depots, kitbashed freight cars and locomotives to represent prototype equipment and developing scenery, all on two decks. It was a great layout to run on.

With my VIA combine off to get painted I'm in a bit of a lull in modelling.  I don't want to undertake another big project as I would like to finish the combine.  I'm venturing into new territory with the crazy idea of actually finishing something.

Keeping with my theme of starting but never finishing modelling projects, I have started work on a resin BGR Group kit of a CN/VIA passenger combine.  These started life as colonist coaches in the teens and 1920's when Canadian Northern (a CN predecessor) ordered a pile of these cars on the expectation that immigration to western Canada would continue as it had in the pre WW1 period.  This didn't happen so many of the colonist coaches were rebuilt into combination passenger and baggage cars for service on secondary passenger trains and mixed trains.  

Only working a few days over Christmas has given me time to do some further work on the layout.  Getting up at my usual time in the morning (too early) gives me time to do some work on the layout before anyone else in the house is awake.  After getting the staging yard throat to my liking, along with getting the routing set up properly, let me work on some other needed things.  

I've started working on the main smelter yard again after a long break.  I was soldering wires in preparation for adding power leads to the various yard tracks when my daughter walked in, looked at what I was doing and asked if she could try soldering.  After a quick tutorial ("Don't touch the hot end!") she was off.  She said she was going to be doing some soldering in a class at school so perhaps I can draft her as a helper when she needs to do her homework.  

For the past several months I have been deferring working on track as I hit a roadblock with controlling my staging yard turnouts.  I am far from an electrical genius so was flummoxed by trying to figure out a workable solution.  During a discussion a while back with my friend Doug H. (who has forgotten more about electronics and such than I'll ever know), he suggested the end run to my staging yard was using a Digitrax DS64 decoder.

I hosted a slide night last week for some friends both local as well as from Portland and Seattle.  It was the annual "The Americans are coming!" slide night that we have had on the US Thanksgiving weekend for at least the past 20 years or so.  One of my guests (thanks Barry!) brought along a copy of VIA Rail Canada Consists and marshalling of trains bulletin from October 1978.  What a treasurer trove of information it is.  

Given that I'm modelling a relatively remote, difficult to access part of the world, that few others model (except you, Tim...), it can be a challenge to get an idea about how to do the scenery.  I'm currently on a work trip to a different part of northern Canada than I model, however there are similarities to the topography and forest cover that I model.  I'm taking advantage of my ability to wander around the bush - no one calls it the forest except tourists - to cast my eye about, looking at how I can capture the look of the land around me on a layout. 

This past weekend I had opportunity to operate some trains on the Kettle Valley Railway http://kettlevalleymodelrailway.blogspot.ca/ .  It is a really well done model railway with handlaid track, beautifully rendered scenery, smooth operating steam, passenger and freight equipment appropriate for the era and locale, all using time table and train orders to keep the traffic flowing.