We live a cozy existence in North America, and still we can relate to those who live in a very different part of the world. Last year I interviewed a friend of mine Ali Alamedy to learn what makes him tick as a scale modeler. What I found is we have many things in common, our hobbies are a part of our lives and we use them to relax from the stresses of the real world in miniature.
 

I visited my friend and fellow IAIS modeler, Joe Atkinson, yesterday. Joe is in the process of converting his entire diesel fleet to Loksound decoders and we got together to try and upload some of the sounds into a few of his decoders and engines. We didn’t get very far with installs, but we learned more about the Lokprogrammer and had a good time catching up and eventually enjoyed running one of his converted engines around the layout with Loksound’s Full Throttle capability. 

I have been working on a structure projects but seem to keep stalling out as they do not have a place to go. I have thought about adding them to various Free-mo modules, but none of them really seem to fit into the plan. I have decided that instead of finishing up structures, then placing them in storage I really should have a place for them to go.

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.

In another thread I shared pictures on my process for using poly fiber mats to do landscaping quickly.  You can see that thread HERE.  Here's a video that I made on the process.

I had heard that the Kansas City Southern, Christmas Train was making its rounds  and pulled up their schedule. They were scheduled to be n Newton Mississippi today, starting at 4 this afternoon. They had a note on their site their executive train would be transporting it. This is the F7 series of Streamliner locomotives. 

Here's a link to the schedule http://www.kcsouthern.com/en-us/pdf/2016-kcs-holiday-express-schedule.pdf

Nothing new here - I just corrected the misspelling of "Richlawn".

NOTE: I added a video showing the step by step process of creating and installing the poly fiber mats.  You can see the video HERE.

NOTE:  I added more pictures and description later in this thread.