I missed posting a photos of the show last year, but I managed to spend some time getting photos ready to post this year.  As always, the show is held at the Western Development Museum in Saskatoon, which has a replica of a main street in an average prairie town in 1910.  The museum is fairly dark in the areas of "Boomtown" and I don't have the skill/patience to get better photos than what I've got.  I tried to get at least one photo of all the layouts on display.

So, my daughter came home with a project idea for one of her classes.  They have been divided into groups and have to do a report/presentation on different regions of Canada.  Their group got the Cordillera region, which encompasses most of BC, the Yukon and a bit of Alberta.  She suggested to her group to do a 3D map of the area, and her Dad could help!

While I considered putting this in for a Reverse Running submission, I figured it wouldn't be accepted and eagerly await it being marked as spam, but I just have to say this, while partially tongue-in-cheek, there is an underlying truth here.  

As soon as I heard Bill Brillinger was selling his little shelves he had in his blog, I jumped on the opportunity to pick up a few.  I ordered them last week and received them yesterday.  While I was watching the Oilers play terribly, come back strong and then lose in overtime, I put two of them together.

This is what I had when I first opened the package:

Well, I haven't done much this summer in terms of trains.  Too many things to do around the house and trying to make the best of my daughter's last summer before she prepares for university.  But I digress.

I was responding to MLW's Canadian post and kind of went off on a bit of a tangent, but had already typed it out, so I thought I'd create a new blog post about it since it was already written!

This will be where I detail my modular layout that I plan to use as another sort of chainsaw that may or may not actually get the chainsaw.  It will depend on how it turns out.  

The main purposes of this layout are:

1)  Have something to run, test and display trains on while I begin the construction of the main layout.

2)  Test out some techniques I haven't had the chance to try yet.

3)  Display at the local hobby show and allow kids to actually run a train and move cars around.

It is extremely difficult to find HO scale cars that were quite common in the 70s and early 80s.  You can find exotics and such, but generally no run-of-the-mill cars.  And the detailing?  Generally they scream "model."  

It finally came!!  I may be one of the last in North America to get theirs, but my Canadian finally arrive today after the postal service misplaced it somewhere for a few days.  And my relief is only exceeded by my excitement.  This may be a boring post for many, so bear with me.  It will have a lot of photos and not a whole lot else but giddy mutterings by a 40 year old kid in a candy store.  Here it is as the postal lady brought it:

The last few days I've spent in the train room pulling stuff apart, cleaning up and organizing in preparation for the "next one."  Its given me time to reflect on lots of lessons learned, as well as how little the chainsaw actually cost me in dollars.