No I'm not talking about what you might think.  I came into a good supply of 40 foot Intermountain boxcars in a variety of paintschemes, none of which are appropriate for my timeframe or location.  Since I have started my backdating project I will need a significantly larger number of 40 foot boxcars, so into the vat of 99% alcohol they go.  Sorry for any fans of these roads, but they are being sacrificed for the greater good.

Another project!  The guys in the Freemo group really REALLY want a yard to be able to support some operations.  Up until now, we have pretty much been in "proof of concept" mode and getting all the modules bullet proofed.  We have attracted some new active participants and now have a pretty decent length of run and variety of industries, and a couple of other yards that are under construction.

When laying out my new Revere Street Free-mo module I was looking at my aerial photo of the area and say\w a building on the corner of Division and Revere Street. Out of curiosity I checked in on Google Earth to see if the structure was still there and I was pleased to see it still standing. The building was also a unique structure which I thought would make from a great building at add to the module. After cruising around  the building in Google Earth and grabbing some screenshots I decided that it would make for a good Restaurant. 

This is a layout that was design by John Prescott I met on facebook. I been fasinated by the N&W railroad and there passenger trains and coal haling mountain railroad. Its more a freelanced part of Bluefield West Virginia. The main yard its self is 40 feet long by 18 in wide. I am going to have a 15 stall roundhouse and freight house and some freight switching in Bluefield like the prototype. The N&W was all double track but am doing my single track with lots of passing sidings, No I am not doing the electric helpers. The grade is going to be between 2 2-!/2 % grade.

One of the great things about the model railroad hobby is that it has a lot of different aspects to it.  When I get tired of doing the layout construction and/or electrical aspect, I can shift to buildings & scenery.  For the last couple of weeks, I have been working on some of the key buildings within the Union Station area of the layout. Even though I had shifted from doing track & electrical, I ended up having to add an additional passenger track (Track # 4)  to Union Station to provide for mail and postal operations.

My HO Welztalbahn layout is reasonably small, though I'm thankful that I was able to acquire the 8x9ft real estate it occupies. For an operating layout, that is also supposed to have some scenery, this is not much space to work with.

I regularly post photos on my blog that are taken on the layout. One trick I started using a while ago is to take on-layout locations out of context and tell a different story in the photo than what you see on the layout.

Hi! :)

I just got to have a few on my layout....  How to model UFO-eggs realistic in H0 scale for diorama, model railroad Railway (without being obducted by aliens).

Hi,
based on Geoff Bunza's fantastic DCC decoder, I have developed a simple PC board to control 16 servos via DCC. Nothing fancy, but building these decoders from protoboard was just too tedious for me.