The story of the Blackhawk, Eagle River, & Eastern cannot be told without first telling the story of it's founder, Cornelius Percival Wright, and the Wright family themselves. After a few years as an apprentice shipwright, Percival Wright opened Wright Yards in Bristol, England in 1574. He quickly became favored by the local merchants and then the Royal Navy for the design and quality of his ships.

Tonight was my only free night this week so I decided to run a mini op session on the layout and see how it went. I will have between 9 and 12 car spots depending on how I set up the industries.

-3 spots at the lumber dealer

-2 or 3 spots at the manufacturer

-2 hopper spots

-1 or 2 tank spots

-1 or 2 team track spots

Nate's blog index

• Trackwork

• Roadbed and a Name Change

• Small progress and DCC questions

• Busy weekend

• Track plan update

With the forum change coming up I was going to wait and start my blog/journal/whatever over there, but I'm too excited not too!!

I finally got all my track down and ran my first train! I've never soldered before so that was kind of making me a little slow to get it done. And it's safe to say that IMO soldering is harder than it looks! I was able to solder all the feeders onto the underside of the rails because I want to hide them as much as I can. However it took many tries and many of them had to be resoldered at least once. 

I've had some free time over the past couple weekends and made some progress on the layout. The foam is in it's basic shape, glued, and painted. Today I was able to get the roadbed glued down for the main and runaround as well as the transitions to the spurs. I just need to get the transitions sanded and paint the roadbed and then I will be ready to lay track!

It's been a while since I've done an update. I got married, so there hasn't been a done of progress on the layout. I do have all the turnouts I need finally! (ME turnouts are fairly hard to find right now, especially if you're trying not to pay 2x the cost for them)

I got all of my model stuff moved out of the closet and onto the shelves today. I also inventoried all my rolling stock, turnouts, and buildings. I had a pretty good idea in my head of I have, but it's nice to have it all formatted nicely and written down so I can see what's all there. Just need to do the same with tools and flex track, along with my rolling stock at my train club, and then I'll have everything inventoried. I'm ready to get the foam on the modules and start playing with track and building mock ups now!

I played around a bit tonight and I think I am pretty close to what the final plan will be. I think at this point I just need to mock up the structures and sit them and the track out on the modules to get everything finalized.

Original plan with lost of nice scenery etc added:

Revisions from tonight:

It's been quite a while since I've made any progress on the layout. It turns out that wedding planning takes up a ton of time in the later stages, even if you're not really doing the planning and are just going to meet people or pick up things with your fiancé lol Between that and the holidays, the layout was on the back burner for a while.

The cabinets/bases are built. They will be stained and have doors added at a later date. The modules themselves need some more work. They do not lay flat as currently built with 2x4s, so I think I will rebuild them with L-girder frames. Not sure when I will get to that, holiday plans have my foreseeable weekends booked.

Thanks to everyone who has read and commented so far!