It's not hard to have a love affair with a narrow gauge railroad. The 3 foot gauge was often necessary to handle the tight curves and steep inclines associated with mountain railroading. Such prototypical settings lend themselves to some great modeling possibilities. Such a railroad was the East Broad Top located in the mountains of South-Central  Pennsylvania. The EBT was a 32 mile line connecting mines that extracted good quality bituminous coal from Broad Top Mountain to an interchange with the PRR at Mt. Union, PA.

I had been hanging onto an old MDC plastic caboose kit, ( I detest ready to run), I finally broke down and built it today, one because I found I already had the correct decals on hand, and two I was bored, so here she is, still needs a brake wheel standard, but I will use Athearn parts for those since the MDC parts provided weren't correct.

A couple days ago I registered with one of our Sponsoring Advertisers "CMT Model Trains". Apparently I put (.com) at the end of my e-mail address and it should be (.net) and Steve at CMT went out of his way to call me at my home yesterday and left me a message explaining that he had tried numerous times to E-mail me with the information I had requested and that the address I had given him wouldn't work and he kept having his E-mail returned as un-deliverable and left me his phone number to call him directly.

I happen to have (read had) a happier than normal paypal account; due to the fact that I've been selling off other non-train hobby related items these past few weeks. So there's this auction up on eBay....and I'm thinking to myself, well, the last thing I need right now is another locomotive - especially an expensive brass jobby.

But.....

So I looked at my paypal account, and placed a bid.

And I won!

THere is an old saying that says "Man proposes and God disposes." It' s very applicable to me today as I had planned to get Brooklyn N-Traks show today. I had wanted to see the guys and the layout since I don't have any family obligations today that would have kept me home. So I guess God didn't like my plans because we woke up with a foot of snow on the ground here in Queens, NY. The streets have been plowed but all that did is to pile the snow up against the cars.

Now that I have the Yard layout set I've been putting the 4% Narrow Gauge Main line grade out of Ridgway toward Placerville and Telluride using the cookie cutter style baseboard. I have about 40 feet of baseboard installed so far and My wife went to bed so I had to quit cutting and screwing the baseboard down and decided to glue down some cork roadbed in place. Usually I use wood glue to attach the Cork roadbed and I have 3 or 4 tubes of Caulking type tubes of liquid nails so I Tried it. It is so much less messy than any other adhesive I've ever used before.

December 13, 2009, Once again, we have a nice turnout, not a lot of sales, but I did buy a whole bunch of HO scale buildings for $3 each, as two ladies from our club were selling off buildings from an estate, the proceeds went to help financially enhance the West Hernando Central Model RR.

At the end of the day, I was able to get the rest of the buildings that were left on the table for a mere $20.00, so I not only got some decent buildings, but also got some ebay fodder in the process.

 Kalmbach Publishing announced my new book, The Model Railroader's Guide to Steel Mills. I am accepting pre-orders for signed copies on my web site at www.alkemscalemodels.com

The book is due in April 2010. 

I recently got a hold of a movie from Sunday River Productions that features John Allen's Gorre & Daphetid. It has been visually and sound remastered and purports to be the only movie ever made of the layout befor John Allen died and the layout burned down.