I was talking to a teacher at my highschool who inherited much of a closed hobby shop in these items were a large amount of LGB so I now want to try bringing up to our school the possibility of building a garden railroad in the courtyard of the school. I feel like this would be a great area as we already have a pond there and it is a place where people go and eat their lunch to. What I want to do here though is see what are some of the challenges of building a garden railroad and how should I go about it.

After a wonderful day at local train, I decided to retire to the basement and survey my recent acquisitions.  I got a hit for a 3 stall roundhouse and a 3 stall add on.  I put it away and decided to look for 2 Accurail boxcar kits I bought last year.   Looking quickly lead to prepping the parts.  A dry fit of parts quickly turned into a completed car.  It honestly felt like cheating when you look at how long I have been working on the F&C car.  OK  it has been on and off work, but still, the Accurail is done and the F&C is still in progre

So I made this commitment to design a plug and play powered turntable and write a tutorial on it , something that can be built with (mostly) off the shelf parts, including an Arduino. (This isn't about the visible bits of the turntable, just the mechanism that turns it.) Any wiring will be restricted to standard things like switches and pushbuttons, with no circuit building required. The recent post by AnyRail shows one possible approach using a popular stepper motor with internal gearing.

YES! I finally got them!

An Oscar and Piker! (eBay finds)

The Oscar is half built, which is fine (though the interior colours have grown on me, the exterior I'll have to change)

The Piker is still in all of it's original plastic... WOW that's a lot of little bits of wood pieces!

My first ever "Craftsman" kits... I'll probably finish the Oscar first, seeing how it's half way finished, it will give me some clues on how best to build the Piker.

I have a large section of layout where I need to model a corn field. I looked into one of the best products on the market, JTT’s very realistic looking corn stalks, but it would be expensive when covering large areas. 

I then looked into the corn rows made by Busch and, bingo, nice looking stalks that cover quite an area per box compared to the JTT product. So, Busch it is. 

Hi! Enjoy the ride on one of the largest model railroads in Scandinavia!

As I now have a system for car routing and train management, I need to move on and get JMRI working for control of the track. Ideally, I would like have JMRI controlling all of the points and then, as I have a defined set of trains, a route set up for each of those trains.

More weathering I’ve done, these on the Hitop