After a devastating flash flood last weekend, I'm still pulling carpet out of the living room of the house, The train room was also flooded, but naturally, the railroad sits high, and none of the trains or electronic equipment was effected, it will probably be a few more weeks before I get back into my regular mode of doing videos and such, I do have a video which was posted immediately after the flood took place...

This week has been largely spent recovering from last weekend's major project.... which had nothing to do with model railroading.

So..  the stuff that did.... first there is one (of a pair, need to build #2) of Walther's Wet/Dry grain silos:

This is a very large model - fully 12" high.

I have made some progress in the last little while on my N-scale Kamloops Division Point layout. I have glued in some ties and made a few turnouts. Here are some pics of that:

The blue paint is relatively new....

Lots of ties...... :p

During the Memorial Day weekend, I actually managed to get a few things done on section 1 of the layout.  The biggest accomplishment was completing the DCC standard wiring.  The power bus is 12 ga. stranded copper in red and green insulation.  Feeders are 18 ga. solid copper wire soldered to rail joiners.  The power bus is connected through the section to two terminal strips (one on each end).  Connections are made with suitcase connectors, and all rail joints are soldered to improve connectivity.

     Even though I order most of my HO supplies from internet suppliers, I also try to help support local hobby shops whenever I can. Unfortunately, there is only one small shop in my locality and its the kind of place that whenever I go there for an item, they never have it in stock (or at least so it seems). The owner always has it "on order" and it'll "be here on ?". I can understand not having a large inventory having spent most of my working life in a retail environment, but today was the "straw that broke the camel's back"!

 Well, I was hoping for a GPS for my birthday yesterday and got a ski jacket instead.  Very nice jacket and I will really appreciate it come winter time, but I was prepped for the GPS so I was admittedly a little disappointed, but I hope I didn't show it.  I wanted the GPS so I didn't have to use my train money to buy one, and now I'm thinking I maybe don't need the GPS as much as I thought!

At this point I have pretty well beaten up the horse; we're not much different now from who we were long ago, and many of the arguements then are still arguments now.  Heck, I just saw an article lamblasting the idea of scale operating couples, placing the dichotomy that couplers will have to be either larger and functional or to scale and dummy.  And I saw another calling for a need for remote operating couplers and arguing against those who prefer to manually do it because that's how the prototypes do it!  I almost shudder to think how similar these

 As we have been talking about Palm Trees in a different thread, I just found this link on how to make trees, I thought it would be useful here.

http://www.sierrarailroadmodels.com/MAKINGTREES.html

 If you look at the photo (below) of the SP SD38-2, you'll notice lights in the nose.  I'm trying to find if Cannon or some other manufacturer makes this nose or at least there is a detail part that I can adapt to the nose.  

Does anyone have any insight how to replicate the correct nose with the lights?

Thanks,

So here we are.  In a hobby that's not always known for being inexpensive and in the middle of a very irritating economic situation as well.  This is both good and bad.  Good in that we can usually find some pretty nice deals on things as the hobby manufacturers try to keep revenue flowing.  Bad in that our own personal hobby budgets can shrink to nothing while we get through the tough times.