So my C.H.I.P. $9 mini-computer finally arrived. It's not quite as powerful as the Raspberry Pi, but at a quarter of the price it's a straight-up bargain. It comes pre-loaded with a Debian flavour of Linux which can have a bit of a learning curve, but within an hour or so I had it set up to boot right into JMRI and then automatically launch a WiThrottle server. I'm using a Sprog as the interface with the layout. Within two minutes of turning the power on, I can whip out my phone, open Engine Driver, and be off to the races. Now I just need to make everything look presentable.

I've been spending the last couple of weeks blissfully running 3-2-2 Inglenook sessions on my grain mill layorama. With five total cars, there are 60 possible three-car trains that can be made up. And I've found that it can take as little as three moves to build a train. Contrast this with a 5-5-3 and its eight total cars producing 6,720 possible five-car trains, and you can see how the puzzle complexities of each variation are orders of magnitude apart.  While still entertaining, this can get rather unsatisfying even when working at prototypical speeds.

It’s been a good ten months since I’ve done anything model railroad related.  My daughter was born in September and my boy just turned two in March.  Needless to say, domestic bliss has pushed everything else to the back burner.  But now things are normalizing, sleep is becoming more and more consistent, and I’m starting to shake off the rust that my hobby life has accumulated.

I went for a drive today along the BCRY to get some inspiration.  I took this picture of the siding at Colwell, Ontario and I think that it visually encapsulates this shortline perfectly.  Here we have the former CN Meaford Subdivision which began life as the Ontario, Simcoe & Huron Union Railroad in 1855, and once a moderately busy Class One branchline, now barely clinging to relevance as it twists its way through the wilderness choking on rust and weeds.

My layout benchwork, which consists of a pair of 78.5 x 11.5 bi-fold doors topped with foam, has been up for most of the year.  During that time I've done nothing to it other than add a backdrop and fascia.

I recently came across these long-lost photos of the N-Scale Train-in-a-coffee-table I built for my mom for Christmas 2006 and I thought I'd share them here.  This was a fun project catering to my inner child, so prototype accuracy was a non-issue.  My mom cares not about such things as rapido couplers, switching operations or a landscape with only one type of tree.  

The details:

I'm on a BCRY MOW car kick lately, as I'd like to have some models of rolling stock that the shortline actually owns.  It began with the cut down gons which I've just started, and now I'm tackling ballast hoppers.  As anyone familiar with N knows, there are basically two RTR ballast hoppers available; the beautifully done Atlas 70-ton Hart hopper and the generic Walthers hopper with crude 70s-era tooling.  This ended up being a rather tough decision...

Since moving into our house last fall, we have yet to open all of our boxes.  Some of these boxes have been moved at least twice without being opened.  Most of these are stored in our spare room but as it's being turned into a nursery, they need to be dealt with one way or another.   Being as this weekend was about 1,500 degrees (celcius), we took refuge in our air conditioned oasis to do productive indoor things.

I've been told in no uncertain terms that the kitchen table is not an ideal hobby workbench.  I can't say as I find any flaws in that logic, so I went about finding a suitable alternative.  I first thought sticking a table under the shelf layout was the best bet, but we have two cats and one of them is an idiot, so that would simply provide him with a launch pad to the otherwise out-of-reach layout.  So off to find plan B.

So last night, I was doing a decoder install for BCRY #1001 (TCS CN-GP into a Lifelike Proto GP18).  After getting everything into place, it was time to test.  I went down to the basement to get some Unitrack to hook up to my laptop.  When I opened the door to the pantry cabinet where I keep most of my train stuff, one of the shelves inexplicable collapsed, sending my modest collection of nine hoppers, two centerbeams, two tank cars and a GP38 plummeting 640 N-scale feet to the concrete below...