Several little things cropped up in my musings lately while laying out the Dettmer Spur on my Emerald, Leemer & Southern route. One is related to the ideas recently expounded upon regarding how much detail is really needed. And my wife, who does interior design work. threw me this---we may be seeing a form of minimalism in model railroading.

Taken by Warren Smith from about 900 ft. away, before BNSF daylighted the tunnel and installed triple track.

This photo is what my office co-workers see by my office door.  They can't miss it:  the loco is 24 inches tall, and the headlight is about chin level.

Okay, Welcome to a Blog established for one purpose - to instruct on the ins and outs of blogging on MRH.

This is not a "what you can't post"  guide - I'm pretty sure there are terms and conditions around here somewhere that cover that. It basically boils down to "keep it clean, this is a family site" anyway.

The most common request seems to be for how to post photos - I did a quick and dirty guide to that over on my personal blog -

Its been a busy couple months and I haven't had a lot of hobby time.  Because I fly a lot, I bought several books, as I've mentioned in other threads, to read and try to learn more about operations and design.  Things are less cloudy, but I still don't feel confident in designing something that will be operationally pleasing.  I think researching a specific area and the operations that go on there would help, though, but I'm not sure where to start in that.  Google searches provide general information, but nothing in depth to provide much for industries and the

here is a better copy of transformer wireing diagram.

This weekend I made my first attempt at weathering rolling stock using acrylic and enamel paints, Bragdon weathering powders and Testers Dullcoat. The hopper is an Accurail kit and it took about 4 hours from initial kit building to finishing up the weathering. This is an Airslide Center Flow (ACF) Kansas City Southern (KCS) hopper that was put into service in 1994 and is showing it's 15 years of use on the rails.
Here is the before shot...

I have 15 old freight cars, along with a batch of new trucks and couplers, that I had intended to work on during the super bowl, but the game was too exciting.  So there sits some of my oldest equipment (up to 50 years old):  Athearn, Model Die Casting, Ulrich, and even a Varney.  Wait to next weekend!

I've made another video. It's just for fun.

I've bought this engine, a brass shay, in 1998 at a convention. My friend Friedhelm made new gearing, I had to install a Seuthe smoke unit. With "blood and sweat", 5 mm smoke unit and 6mm stack diameter.

Wolfgang

Winner: 742 - subscriber ID: trainnut
Runner-up: 6586 - subscriber ID: Jim Little

From time to time, all of us need to recharge our modeling batteries.  I'm lucky enough to be able to do it nearly daily - my office is 13 stories above the CSX main somewhere in the D.C. metro area.  So today, preparing to travle this weekend, I had my digital camera in my office, and managed to grab these shots of the CSX train that came through at noon.  The first three are of trash containers - two shots from my office window, and the third from  ground level.  Then, just because I was intirgued by the geometry, a coupler picture.