Having spent months planning, designing and redesigning, I feel like I have now gotten a railroad that I will enjoy building and will be a blast to run., This is a short video tour of what I hope it will look like.

https://youtu.be/7_9Xtww6By8

Moderator note: embedded video for easier viewing

I decided it would be good to make a post just reflecting on what I have learned and grown in the way of the hobby. I started out just really 4 years ago now (wow I realize it is a lot longer now) in being serious about the hobby. Just the few years ago my track was a oval of Bachmann EZ track with cruddy TYCO DC engines. I went up a little from there with my first nice engine being a Atlas Classic GP7 in the santa fe book end scheme. I still have it and also a matching engine too.

I love to see the grand model empires and inspirational modelling that appear in MRH and on this website, and get plenty of ideas and new techniques to try. However, my modelling is on a much smaller scale, as is more common here in the UK. The scenic area of my layout is a mere 5 feet by 1 foot six, and I try to follow 2mm Finescale standards (that is 2mm/ft 1/152 scale 9.42mm gauge) although I do make use of some British N scale items (1/148) by replacing the wheels.

So, those who have followed me, know I started a layout on top of the bookshelf attached to my desk. Those of you know I started out modeling the "Old West", which turned into the "Wild West", which was far from prototypical, and then "Movie set of the Wild West" (suggested by one of the kind folks here... forgive me for not remembering names... I can look it up, maybe?) which opened up a LOT more possibilities, and is the PERFECT thing to model for a first layout. (I mean... movie set... I want Steam Punk on the rails? DONE! I want a Western? DONE!

When you're just keeping your head above water on a major layout project, you may not realize that you've reached a major milestone until you're right on top of it. And if you're not careful, you may just blow right past it. That almost happened during my last ops session on the Valley Line. Read more about it in the lastest post at http://www.thevalleylocal.net Enjoy!

Chris

The Valley Local

Modeling the New Haven Railroad's Connecticut Valley Line in October, 1948

I bought this layout as just a bench work frame with sectional brass track. My ‘interim plan’ was to just clean up the brass track, smooth out its form, solder all the joints of the sectional track together to obtain some good electrical contact, and then run some trains.

I would then sell it off to another rr-fan and build my dream layout.

Several years back, I got it into my head to model a steam excursion.  I decided I'd try to do IAIS 6988, which was a bit of a stretch for my modeling area, but there weren't many good options available in plastic, and besides it would be interesting to model the modifications they made to make it look more American.

So I've been contemplating making a car that can be used to clear the flanges on track after ballasting (and can be run every so often to make sure no debris is interfering with operations) and then tonight, while in the porcelain library, reading an old model railroading magazine, I discovered "Flangers"!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flanger_(railroad)

Hi!  I´ve been working on getting a realistic gravel ground covering for my sawmill and ended up with the process presented in this video.