So at this point I have finally finished a huge long project I planned many years ago, the compilation of the complete story of my past layouts.

There's been a a huge payback to my work I didn't realize until I was trudging through the Upstairs layout.

******* UPDATE ******** THIS JUST IN!

Well, my artist came over tonight for "next steps" and when she saw the clouds she said "they have to go!"  Among the things she said about the clouds were "too many"..."too big"...."not realistic".  Ouch!  She was the one that told me to paint clouds (after seeing what my clouds looked like on the existing portion) and told me to paint the horizon so she would know where to start painting.

After building my railroad for about a year in the Library, I realized there had been a lull of about three months in which I did very little to no work at all on my layout.  I tried to isolate the problem.

And so it was the summer of 2006, and I had just got home from Geology field camp to face the prospects of moving out of my apartment and into my uncle's house on the other side of town.  My lease was up at the end of July, and so I spent the week or so that I had removing stuff; it took a load in my Fairlane, a load in my Uncle's one ton van, and then a load in his 72 F-100 to get everything out.

OK, after FINALLY catching up on 5 pages of posts because I was away for a bit more than a week, I thought I'd post some pictures from my adventure yesterday to see Jason Shron of Rapido Trains show off the latest samples of his HO Canadian and FP9's.  Yesterday, he was at Fun Time Hobby and Cycle in Red Deer, AB, so I thought I'd rent a car and make the 6 hour drive from Saskatoon and check it out.

Just found this pic of a 1929 model railroad:

Click here to view the original image ...

The Third Apartment Layout

Somewhere between now and then I misplaced my files on the third revision of the Original Apartment Layout.  Luckily there is some information here and there, and all the photographs, since I stored them in a separate location.

Hi Jack from Star, Idaho.  A week or so ago I posted a blog about dying ballast.  I appreciate the advice to try Scenic Express.  I have purchased from scenic express before but I never looked close at the actual stone ballast they sell.  I only looked at the first page because I thought it was for the larger scale trains.  However, to my surprise they make it for HO and N scale.  Thanks again for leading me to the right place because I found the dark grey ballast that I was looking for.  I received it today and the color was perfect.&

Hi All,

I’ve posted on this forum a few times with tips on various techniques I’ve developed while building my new layout.  The layout is based on the Great Western Railway in Northern Colorado which served the sugar beet industry in the area. The GWR was started in 1901 and still exists today even though the sugar beet industry is gone.  I’m modeling the late 1950s when sugar beet processing was still a big business. Both steam and diesel locomotives were in use then.

I worked on one of the signature scenes of the layout Long Ravine.  This is where the Southern Pacific crossed over the Nevada County Narrow Gauge below.  A lot of prototype photos were taken here.  My scene is compressed quite a bit relative to the real one but I tried to get the flavor.  In this picture, my largest locomotive an AC-12 Cab Forward  (HO scale) is passing over my smallest NCNGRR #9 (HOn3).