It was June 2013, I stood in a cool and inviting finished basement of my new-to-me home. It felt wonderful, my wife and I more or less finished moving in and I was thinking about what to do with my new basement.  Looking back, I am not sure if this was a major accomplishment since we did not actually furnish every room for another 7 years.  The basement had all the makings of a train room (carpet, drop ceilings, lights, outlets, and buy in from my spouse).  I was going to have a layout.  Years later this would be one of my favorite photos.

It's been a year and half since I tore down my last layout so we could move.  After a lot of remodeling work in the new house I'm glad to say that I'm finally able to begin construction on a new layout, the Pokey 3.0!

As I've done before, this will be an HO free-lanced layout, based loosely on the N&W Pocahontas District between Bluefield, W. Virginia, and Williamson, W. Virginia, era 1966, with some Appalachian mountain scenery which I love.

Hey, folks, on this thread I will be posting new videos from the Thunder Mesa Youtube channel. Most of these fall in to the "Thunder Cam" category with scenic views of the railroad in action. My "How-To" vids will usually get threads of their own with links to expanded information on the Thunder Mesa blog. Enjoy!

First off, let's take a tour of the entire layout.