For folks who may be interested, I thought I'd put up a quick update about the Barre Branch.

We moved from the Middle East to California last year, and after renting, found and closed on a house. That's the good news, the bad news, is like most Southern California homes, it's too small for the layout.

And so, it goes.

The end to the story following my progress of the Central Vermont RR's Barre Branch layout's construction.

Modeling 22 Stories Up

As a damn (proud) Yankee, one of the things that often defines the North East, and especially my home (which is also the area which I'm modeling) are (field) stone walls. Long before some states were, well, states, folks in the North East had cleared their lands, and used the unfortunate primary crop from their fields (stone) to create walls.

These walls were used to mark out the field, and also as property markers.

For my layout, the major local quarry (Rock of Ages) owned and used a number of small steam locomotives. Some of these were tank engines, including a pair of 0-6-2s from Baldwin that were sold to the quarry by the Barre and Chelsea railway in 1948 and 1952.

The following two images are not mine, and are used without permission.

The Central Vermont Railway only had two RS-3s, and only had those for a couple of years before they were transferred to its sister the Grand Trunk.

I love the lines on the RS-3, and even though it's a bit of a squeeze in my timeline,  I had purchased one when I first started in the hobby in 2008. I installed my first sound decoder in it, and than proceeded to immediately plunge it to its death; off the layout and onto a concrete floor.

I've recently returned from holiday. What on earth does that have to do with a (model) train related forum? Well, as the trip was centered in part on an across Africa train trip,  thought folks might have some interest!

At long last, Norman W and I were able to get together for an afternoon (it's been quite a few months!), an exciting development for me, as I wanted a "real" ops session over the replaced curved turnout sets of module 3.