We'll take a hiatus from Siskiyou Line progress this blog post and celebrate my 60th birthday with a ride behind an 1:8 scale live steamer on a perfect day!

My birthday is today (May 18) but we celebrated it and my youngest grandson's birthday (May 1) yesterday, Sunday, May 17th. Went to the live steamer park in Mollala, OR, Shady Dell, and spent the afternoon there in perfect sunny 70s weather!

I've made some progress since my last blog entry, but not the progress I was expecting.

I ended up taking a detour because I asked a very important question: where would the signals go between Sutherlin and Oakland. Turns out, it's very fortunate I thought to ask this question, because the result saved me a ton of grief later.

As we begin the journey toward this August and having the Siskiyou Line on display for the NMRA National Convention in Portland, Oregon, I'm going to start documenting the layout's progress here in my MRH blog.

We're currently working on the upper deck at the opposite end of the room from the entrance - on my layout this is the Sutherlin/Oakland area.

To remind you where this is, here's my upper deck track plan. The area we're working on is on the far left and lower left of this plan (Click the plan to enlarge it).

Over on one of the N scale forums there's been a lot of discussion about what's going on with the paper magazines and what that all means for the future of the hobby.

As the publisher of MRH, I track this closely and I have some insight that may help.

For years, the paper magazines have been declining in circulation. Looking at the two leading model railroading magazines, Model Railroader and Railroad Model Craftsman, you can see MR peaked about 1993 and RMC has been steadily dropping since 1980:

Tony Koester answers questions after his Multideck Layouts clinic at the
X2011 West NMRA Convention in Sacramento, CA.

TONY KOESTER on Multi-deck layouts

MRH is at the NMRA Pacific Northwest Regional convention in Seattle right now. One of the better-known modelers from this region is Paul Scoles. We attended his scenery clinic today and it was delightful and informative.

Paul put some paving sand on a piece of pink foam that he had painted a dark green-brown. He used wet water to shape the scene's terrain not unlike how you did sand castles as a kid. Then he soaked it with glue ...

FOR INFO ON RAILS BY THE RIVER 2011, SEE: http://railsbytheriver.com.

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Attending Jeff Hanke's clinic on selectively compressing a prototype scene ... Here's the steps he recommends:

- Acquire prototype track plans and photos
- Define modeling space, dimensions and operational desires
- Collect prototype details - track names, old photos, old railroaders' knowledge/memories
- Determine the essence of the scene, the signature elements
- Determine haves and wants for the scene - haves are MUSTS
- Eliminate everything else
- Draw the plan - rework until essence is captured
- Build it and compare to model photos

My friend got an iPad this last weekend, and he let me borrow it for an hour. My first impression is - dang, this sucker is fast! Typing on the software-based popup keyboard was easier than I thought it was going to be, and in a short time I was able to type at a pretty good clip with it.

Here's some recent news story summaries that show MRH is riding a coming technology wave ...