I thought I'd go ahead and post a couple pictures of the recent work from the last couple months...

I've been working on the club layout, taking lots of pictures but never posting them...sigh!!  Anyhow...

This city has been completely unearthed...and rebuilt from the ground up!!

Bowie is a simple place on the layout, containing the industries of Womack Wire and Seymore Cement.  The station will be a simple place, a whistlestop more or less, but an important link nonetheless for the people who live in this region.

This project will by and large aim at installing a station and finishing the groundwork in this area of the layout.  The area is literally 4' by 30," so it isn't very large, but there's plenty to fit into the scene.

Are they sitting in the portajohn?

I just finished reading the Model Railroad News review of the new Command and Control Interface from Ring Engineering.  It's very similar to the idea presented by the NWSL test sled, containing a 2.4Ghz Radio Decoder, and it completely eliminates the reliance on track based digital signals. In otherwords, you REALLY DO run your TRAINS and NOT your track with RCC!

I'm digging up an old project I have on the back burner and I ran back over this little gem in the rough, my Marion Model 60 effort.  Does anybody have a reference to published plans for the Marion Model 60?  I have some very good photos and I'm this close from drawing a set of plans up, except I'm not familiar with the programs one would use to draw up a model railroad plan in this day and age.  So if I found them already done, that woul dbe a uge leap forward to finishing my project!!

I want to say before going any further that I have had a fair amount of interest in this program.  I really liked the idea, and I even went so far as to think that it would be fun to make this achievement.  I am somewhat distressed, though by a couple relevant technological developments which essentially strip this program of all merit.

I'd thought I'd start a new little hobbyist series particularly aimed at getting modelers started on the modeling track.  blogs of this series will have "Starting Points" in their title.  And they are precisely that - points where YOU the new green modeler can get your teeth wet - and perhaps lose some of the edge on the intimidation factor

So at this point I have finally finished a huge long project I planned many years ago, the compilation of the complete story of my past layouts.

There's been a a huge payback to my work I didn't realize until I was trudging through the Upstairs layout.

After building my railroad for about a year in the Library, I realized there had been a lull of about three months in which I did very little to no work at all on my layout.  I tried to isolate the problem.

And so it was the summer of 2006, and I had just got home from Geology field camp to face the prospects of moving out of my apartment and into my uncle's house on the other side of town.  My lease was up at the end of July, and so I spent the week or so that I had removing stuff; it took a load in my Fairlane, a load in my Uncle's one ton van, and then a load in his 72 F-100 to get everything out.

The Third Apartment Layout

Somewhere between now and then I misplaced my files on the third revision of the Original Apartment Layout.  Luckily there is some information here and there, and all the photographs, since I stored them in a separate location.