It's time to start controlling some turnouts on the railroad.  I was inspired by a panel that was created by Jas for his JL&T Railroad.  Details of that discussion can be found here.

On my layout, this area will be controlled by manual turnouts and I choose Blue Point machines to control these turnouts for their flexibility in placing the controls.

The LCRR (Lake Country Railroad) is a semi-prototypical layout running from Milwaukee, WI to Portage, WI with the main focus in the Lake Country area in Waukesha and Jefferson counties.  Visible staging is Milwaukee and Portage.  Switching will be done in Hartland, Oconomowoc, and Watertown.  Hartland has prototypical track arrangement and industries.  Watertown will have some of the prototypical industries, but the track arrangement is designed to best utilized the space available.

I've been working on the trackwork for a 4' module and I've spend close to 8 hours weathering the track, and I'm not finished yet!  I'm just looking for a little validation that all of the effort is worth the outcome.

One thing I will not continue doing is adding joint bars.  Even with adding rust to them before applying chalk, they are invisible.

One of the rural towns along the area I would like to model is Hartland, Wisconsin.  I really like the track schematic as seen here: 

I did a full scale mock-up of this keeping the proportions as close as possible to the picture above: 

This is the Walthers Wood Coaling Tower that I am building and weathering for my layout. This is my first structure build and weathering attempt. I am following Ron Klaiss’ method located here

Portage is the western staging terminus (semi-hidden) on my Milwaukee Road - Old Line.

The four stub-ended staging tracks are two each at 140" and 150" in length.  The staging lead is a 2.5% grade up to the interchange with the main layout.

I have been looking over the design and trying to envision both operations and signaling.  I know that some may think that this is getting ahead of myself, but I thought it was important for keeping the wiring as simple as possible.  By going through this exercise, it also showed me that I was over-engineering things from an electrical/occupancy sensing perspective.

It's been a while since I posted anything, so I thought it was time for an update.  I have settled on a plan that I think fits the space I have very well.  I moved my location about 50 miles northwest to focus on the old Milwaukee Road mainline between Milwaukee and Portage.  This area was relegated to branch line/backup main service earlier in it's life.  I am focusing on three areas for my layout.

I busted out the box of N Scale cars and track that was in a corner in the basement.  I was going to mock up the latest iteration of Oconomowoc I had designed as a mini chain saw.  Boy were my girls excited about the N Scale cars and track!  (They weren't interested in the HO stuff at all....)

My wife asked why I didn't just do the layout in N Scale and put a loop of HO around the room up out of the way as to not waste the minimal HO pieces that I have.  I had often contemplated making the switch, but never could justify it.

Let me start this BLOG entry with this.  Apparently, my wife realized the folly of her ways when she suggested that I could go around the walls of our basement with a mixed use space as a rec room and a train room.  She has again asked me to have a dedicated room for my trains.