Foliage is the key to realistic landscape modeling in any scale. I´m in this video sharing some of my best application methods, both for bushes and trees, as well as composition and 3D perspective aspects.

Hi everyone,

First, I need to apologies to all of you who have been so supportive of my work. I have failed you all!  I have finished this great project without sharing a single photo with you guys. I will try and make amend of my sins by posting them here, now and I hope you will be able to forgive me.

It worked for me - I hope others try it and report if it works for them.  I would have used artists' wetting agent, I only had rinse aid on hand.

In brief, I made a 0.02% thinning solution of dishwasher rinse aid in tap water

I was happily surprised to see my name listed on this week’s AML podcast. While I hardly consider myself an “All Star”, it is fun to participate in the “friends of” forum. After listening to my interview a number of ideas came to mind that might be of interest to others so need to put pen to paper or do more videos of progress on my Oahu Railway “Pine Spur Branch”.

I will keep the introduction short on this blog. 

I have spent a large amount of time in the hobby collecting and not doing much with what I have purchased. I have also started many layouts that never got much past bench work. Guilty of many of the sins of our hobby I have in a sense watched a decade now fly by with little more then totes full of what amounts to wasted time and money. 

So what am I going to do about it, follow along a short build blog as I basically put up or shut up when it comes to model trains.  

My best friend is building a new layout based on the Minnesota Commercial Hiawatha District in South Minneapolis. So in an search for Minnesota Commercial covered hoppers, I came across this photo of 5316 by Brian Kays in RailroadPicture Archives. So I grabbed the July 2019 issue of MR which has a great article by Jeff Wilson called The Modelers Guide to Covered grain Hoppers.  I did not see anything that was a match.

Just did a little write-up on my visit to Ken Karlewicz' layout over the weekend. Words fail to describe it. English words, anyway. Let's just say his work inspired me to actually speak a foreign language (briefly) - and gave my scenery motivation a boost (significantly). Read all about it over at the Valley Local . . .

Just a brief sharing of a personal history,  i was lost in a memory about our family vacations, and the happy (and bittersweet) reminiscences of my childhood.  From the time of my youth our family drove from Buffalo to Ocean City, Maryland and it occurs to me that along with the great memories of my family and weeks in the sun and fun, these trips just reinforced my train mania.....We would drive every year via route 15 through Pennsylvania,  overnight as the heat was less oppressive and the traffic lighter.  My mother worked overnights, so she was used to being awake at

Hi, it's been a long time since I posted about the TCS throttle. We've been working on getting the throttle ready for release this fall. I've been working on the consisting feature. For the first release, our plan is to have consisting be in-throttle consisting, like the consisting that you get with Engine Driver or the WiThrottle app. In other words, the consist exists in the throttle only. This will allow the consisting to work the same way with any command station. We plan to look at CV19 consisting and JMRI consisting later.

Last friday I got the first building close to completion in Fordyce.

This is the new Walthers kit: The Modern Concrete Warehouse that I'm using for the processing and cold storage building for my Flappers Chicken complex.