I've been working on detailed planning for the Stafford Mills section of my Southern New England. Stafford Mills is based to a great extent on Montville, Connecticut on the CV.

Here's the draft track plan:

Here's a prototype map of Montville I drew to give you an idea of how the inspiration for Stafford Mills looked:

With the N scale book, and associated layout, just about done (I have lots of photos to "tag" with captions, and a few more pretty pictures to take, but the thing is fundamentally complete at this point) it's time to turn my attention to my HO scale Southern New England, which has been pretty dormant since we moved to the DC area from Colorado going on four years ago.

 I'm a real fan of Helicon Focus since it takes care of the biggest issue we face when photographing miniature trains, especially in N scale - depth of field. 

I've been toying with this scene - it's incomplete - the building needs to be moved (I took this shot to locate the best site for the Jake's Gas), I need to add some details to the crossing including planks and crossbucks (actually, I just did that a few minutes ago!)

 I did a guest spot on the Model Rail Cast show blogcast this week. While I've done interviews, and been involved with making videos before, the amount of "post production" work that has to be done never ceases to amaze me.  Ryan Anderson, host of the show, said actually recording the show was a little like making sausage - the end result sure tastes good but seeing the process up close can be a little disturbing.

Working on models and layouts is a little like making sausage - 

I'll be handling the prototype modeling column for MRH - and we have all kinds of interesting, exciting topics in the hopper  . . . but first I have this problem. I have to finish an N scale layout, and an associated book, for Kalmbach.  This should be a case of "model only what the camera can see" but I'm actually enjoying building this stupid thing enough that I don't want to "fake it" - plus I may try to sell it rather than pitch it in the dumpster.

Here's a run down on this thing -

N scale