Following my advice in the Assistant Editors thoughts, I finished the garage and started working on the backdrop. Given the environment that the layout must reside, I built my backdrop with coved corners and coved overhead. This led to making what I term Gothic corners. The Gothic corners turned out to be more work than I anticipated. But more than that a little later on.  I began the backdrop construction by installing the shelf brackets and cutting curved sections so that I could cove the backdrop

After a few hours of ballasting the little munchkin (Toby) paid a visit and wanted to run some trains with Dad.

This is how we ended up finishing after about 45mins of operating a small RDG Local bringing in some covered Coil Cars...

Cheers,

Jas...

Ballasting continues on the L&T Branch towards the last 4' of this area...

Cheers,

Jas...

I can't say enough about the craftsmanship in this modular display about the USMRR in 1864. This individual has gone way past the word excellent.  Not only has he modeled something to great detail that is fantastic, but was done to the exact point in time and knows the whole story of what went on and how it was done. Hope you enjoy. Engines are run on Batteries and it is remote controlled. 

You'd be excused to think that it's a little late to go testing my planned turnout construction. But well, I'm changing it up yet again on this layout, and the Proto:87 posse was in danger of passing me. So, we raced ahead with everything else before finalizing construction techniques. If it doesn't work out, I can always retreat to PC board ties!

Here's a (realy) short video clip I made. This is stop motion animation. About 100 frames = a bit over 3 seconds of video...

Hoarce sez he likes it. Kinda fun although it's a lot of work.

Charlie

On Monday, the UPS guy put the latest test-print of my N scale Metra F40PHM-2 into my eager hands.  I had hoped that this one would be "all systems go" and I could release the model for sale on Shapeways.  The parts fit together beautifully; and the print quality is about as good as I can reasonably expect from the medium.  However, while examining the model, I noticed that the side doors on the shell don't line up with the steps on the frame.  So I'll need to make one final adjustment and test-print before calling it finished.

HI folks,

Below is the latest version of my spreadsheet comparing Track Planning software, based on your comments. This spreadsheet is "organic", so please keep your comments coming.

Thank you!

Al