Wow!  I can't believe that it was April when I last posted to my blog here.  I have been very busy with my layout entry for the Model Rail Radio contest,

  I also rode up north to Gig Harbor to visit with Mike Deverell.  We had a great visit, running trains and shooting the bull.

I also shot a little video of his layout

Dave O

After a long and exhausting journey from Hawaii my family have arrived in Pasadena. We are really excited about the event and I'll share what I see here. The three hour time change makes it challenging to get up in time but we have tomorrrow to get oriented and check out what's being set up for displays, clinics, vendors, and contest entries.

It must have been 85 degrees today so I'm not sure that I'll be up for driving around to layouts. If anyone is here and fels up to driving in this traffic, I'd be more inclined to go with ,or as, a navigator.

After getting my feet wet regarding turnout construction I decided to revisit my previous plans for a switching module. I checked back on the comments on that plan and decided to ditch the interchange track and focus on the actual injection molding plant instead.

There is a reason why William Cornelius Van Horne paid thousands of navvies to lay the CPR: it is remarkably tedious work!  I mean, really, four spikes for every tie!  Is it really necessary?

Tonight I shook the frets out of the Proto:87 Stores packaging and tried out some of their joint bars and spikes.  The joint bars work fine, if a little subtle.  The spikes will drive me crazy!

Been thinking about adding lighting to the structures I am redoing. I like to add LEDs but I have no ideal where to start. I have looked on the net and got more confused. I did a search on here but found mostly Blogs about LEDs for locomotives.

It's become fashionable to call the throw bar of a switch by its proper name: switch rod.  Now, I'm all for using the correct terminology, but it seems to me that calling the giant chunk of PC board that keeps model switch points the correct distance apart gives these abominations more credit than they deserve.  If, on the other hand, we call it a throw bar, and conceal it somehow, we give ourselves an opportunity to create a nice model of the switch rods themselves.

Howard Goodwin has built a railroad empire in the basement of his house that is quality all the way around. This Model Railroad is excellent in all aspects. 

To be honest, this is as more a test of me taking a video and uploading it to YouTube..........
However, the turntable works with zero wobble which I am very pleased with, having spent an age building to tight tolerances and doing a lot of adjustment.
 

Need to work on camera focus but everyone has to start somewhere