I've been working on some overdue updates to my S Scale model of Philly's 30th Street Station. I put in a concourse featuring a representation of the "Transportation" sculpture and a ticket purchase area. I also put in some LED lighting fed off of an Arduino.

Admiring the "Transportation" sculpture in the concourse.

Since I met a guy who works at Dell, who told me about such things as Raspberry Pi's and Arduino's, I've been learning and planning some fun projects for Arduinos on my layout. I'm beginning in my city (Philly) area and will try to implement some of the following ideas:

Signaling
Traffic Lights
Building Lighting
Highway Flashers

Later I might get into areas that other MR's are involved in such as 
DCC control of trains and controlling switch machines

It's been a long Winter here in the Northeast, but it allowed for some good modeling time.

A Dolly Varden car for the East Broad Top visitors.

A black skyscraper for the Philly skyline dubbed the "Darth Vader" building.

On 3/26/13 I made a MRH blog post about some construction articles in “HO Model Trains “Exclusively HO Scale”” by Bill Miller. I recently completed the second car based on his articles. It was an L. C. L. container gondola car used by the Delaware & Hudson and it appeared in the April 1952 issue. The thing that attracted me was the fact that A. C. Gilbert made a similar car starting in 1955 for his American Flyer tinplate line. AF used their basic gondola which differed a bit from the prototype that Mr. Miller wrote about. It was numbered #916.

I made "puff ball" trees in just a few minutes by using the furnace filter technique

http://royhoffman.com/pwrr/fftrees

I left the skewer trunks out and just used one layer of filter material.

As you may know, the prototype East Broad Top didn't operate this year which also means that there won't be the annual Fall Spectacular. I wrote a 'what if' article for my website depicting a ficticious 2012 Fall Spectacular. All of us EBT fans are hoping that things get resolved and everything is up and running in 2013.

I hope you will enjoy it. It's at: http://royhoffman.com/pwrr/fallspec

When I changed the roundhouse and turntable over to the EBT from the S standard guage, I figured that I would have to alter the scratbuilt roundhouse to look a bit more like the EBT prototype. 

Here's the way it originally looked.

A new skyscraper was just added to the Philadelphia section of the S scale Penn Western. I had used some sandstone textured foamcore for the flooring of a food court for the train station and thought that the texture would look good as the siding of a building. So, I designed a 180 foot structure to fill a part of the skyline. After rounding up the parts needed and cutting sections of foamcore, the building actually started out as a kit.