Boy this town is taking forever to get finished! Tonight I'm planning to print the decals and start adding signage. That is always an exciting part of the process because the scenes really start to come to life once the signs are added.

Well, locomotive #7 got a trip through the paint shop this weekend and is now in full service. I got this Bachmann 4-6-0 off eBay for $40 and she wasn't running. Somebody had mis-programmed the sound value decoder. I reprogrammed it and got it running and then replace the OEM decoder with a LokSound V.5. I've been running her for about 6 months in a terrible kindergarten paint job somebody put on (lots of silver paint on various parts and the footboards a poopoo brown color).

Whistle blasting for the approaching grade crossing, #17 pulls the morning local freight westbound into the town of Comptche on my HO scale Pacific Coast Railroad. It is so nice to be able to make photographs that don't show unfinished areas now...

Several evenings of television netted me 9 tree top armatures. I spent Sunday giving them trunks and foliage and planted them on Monday. Just below the tracks I am getting ready to build my first town, but I figured I'd better give this hill some personality first so I'm not reaching over the miniature inhabitant's homes and shops...

is just a stage. I'm taking the philosophy that I'm going to complete my layout one scene at a time. I view the layout as a series of 'sets' that the viewer passes through. Each 'set' will be visually isolated from the others to a certain extent so that people experience them one at a time. Within each 'set' will be a series of detailed scenes that the viewer has to carefully analyze to get an overall idea of the time and location of the layout.

I posted this in response to a comment I had last night, and it really shows the extent of the scenery at this point. All of the track work is down and the railroad is operational. It took me about three years to get there, and was pure work - wiring, track laying and all is not my favorite. The track is Micro Engineering code 83 ande I hand built the turnouts. The bench work is 3/4" x 2.5" tall plywood grid on 12" x 12" centers with 1" construction foam over and 2" construction foam risers for the roadbed. Whew! Glad that's done!

I've never posted to MRH before, but I do get a lot of benefit from the publication and would like to start participating. I'll leave a few photos of my layout to start.

It's a freelanced California line supported mainly by coastal logging. It would have been located a little bit south of the California Western and routed approximately parallel to that line from Albion on the coast to Laughlin where it interchanged up with the Northwestern Pacific. The year is 1928.