One requirement on this structure was that it be possible to pick it up to retrieve derailed cars inside, or on the staging track that passes beneath it at the rear. The stock kit builds into a compact rectangular box, which would be no problem. My version has two wings, with a big split in the floor where the track goes, which made worry that picking it up would put a strain on the middle of the building. So I ran two pieces of aluminum stock across to create a rigid spine, as seen here:

I understand that many of you are probably feelin' a little bit down, so I thought I would create this blog for the purpose of comedic relief.  Basically the idea is to find the dumbest, funniest, most incorrect and absurd renderings of prototype paint schemes we can.  You'd be surprised just how many fails were turned out by the big names of yesteryear.

I shall start with the classic Santa Fe Warbonnet.

I'm still planning, trying to nail down minimums. This thread's about aisle widths.

When I say Jas's printed road idea I thought I would give it a try to repave the village of Humbird on my layout. I used a combination of Photoshop and Illustrator to produce the paving images and printed them on heavy paper.

Here are a couple of images of the installed roadway. Bother the road and parking lot was done using his printing technique.

Thanks for sharing this idea Jas, I love how it turned out.

I got a bonus at work, and I get an annual payment from the Army for having gotten out in '98 (long story). 

So I decided to buy a couple toys. The lights are still on the way, but the Hohem gimbal stabilized camera mount got here on Sunday. I had minor configuration issues with it (the Hero3 turns out to be too light, but as a model railroader, I have adhesive weights), but a little work in the app and it appears to be smooth as silk.

No more motion sickness inducing "Go-Pro on-a-stick" videos... 

I found myself with a Athearn GP38-2 in CSX colors and an Atlas Trainman GP38-2 in CNW colors, both DC.  My layout is DCC running CSX and my freelance road. The Atlas Trainman GP’s are superb quiet runners available at a very reasonable cost; I have a few with Digitrax no sound DCC decoders added. After adding a Digitrax decoder to the Athearn it proved to be an unacceptably noisy grinder. Despite cleaning up the old grease on the gears and re lubing everything it’s still a grinder.

I just received an email confirming that the convention in St. Louis this September has been cancelled:

Dear Fellow Narrow Gaugers,

 In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, the St. Louis convention committee has decided to cancel the 40th National Narrow Gauge Convention.

Hello folks, never really posted here but thought I'd share the current progress on my little 9x2.5 N scale layout I've been working on over the last year.  

The layout is almost entirely urban with most buildings scratch-built.

My most recent task has been striping the streets and generally getting that sort of work done.