It’s been a long time coming but I finally “lettered and numbered” my Great Western steam engines.  Many thanks to William Brillinger of Precision Design Co. (www.pdc.ca)for the decal artwork and decal sheets. He did a fantastic job on the artwork and his decals are excellent quality. Also thanks to Jeff Shultz for a posting some time ago that pointed out that Bill does custom decals. The rest of the story is in the comments.

Update: I wasn't happy with the "point&shoot" photos so I redid them with my SLR.

Hi,

I've just started a project to make 52 (+3 for me) three bay covered hoppers.  ARI makes the full size car that I wanted to model exactly (the T4250) but there is no model of the car.  I've compromised by using an Intermountain Railway ACF 4650 covered hopper in kit form, gray styrene.  My thought is to do a blog of the start to finish of these cars.

The latest post over at my Valley Local site raises what might be a controversial topic, but I wanted to go there since I'm really interested in hearing and learning from the experiences of others that have been hosting operating sessions for a while.

To what extent do you open your layout for operations? Friends only? Friends of friends? The Whosoever?

I was taking some photos to compare my recent n-scale Atlas Master RS-3 with my first (50 y/o?) RSC-2 diesel. It was made in Yugoslavia for Atlas and its box is no longer around.

Then I noticed. There seems to be someone in the cab of the RSD!

Spooky!

Gavin and me op session 5/7/17

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x8rP4wDxtdg&t=7137s

​o gauge layout update 4/22/17

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XVzgJFvlooQ&t=1618s

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Frj2GeDSiCk&t=13s

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WDCNB52VvJk

maybe everybody already knows this and I'm really late to the party. But for the people who showed up late here's a great tool to help hold things in place when building stuff. 

One of my more popular videos on my Seaboard Central YouTube channel is my Feb 2016 Layout Update featuring working ballast hoppers to distribute ballast on my layout. For those of you old enough to have owned original Athearn Blue Box kits you might have had some of their four bay offset hoppers with plastic bottom gates that could be positioned open. I still have two that I relettered for my Seaboard Central.