Friends, I would like to present my new Snow Diorama, build by my Friend Stefan Foerg.

When I've some free time, I love to visit the Railpictures.net Archive to find new Ideas for future Dioramas. One of my dreams was to have a snow covered Diorama for some nice Winter action. I've found many cool picture on the Railpictures Website and two of them where exactly what I was looking for.

One of the things I learned in the military and in life is not to be afraid to make a decision. That's because I know you can always make another decision.

Currently working on the design for an auto plant on my HO layout.   The space available varies from 2 feet wide at the narrow end up to 3 feet wide at the other end.   Total length is 26 feet, although a portion of that is eaten up by a turnback curve on the narrow end so it works out to about 24 feet of straight track.

One thing I can not determine for sure is the handling of the 89foot boxcars.   As most know, the ones with 8 doors went to GM plants while the 4 door went to Ford and Chrysler.   But why did the door differences matter?

Having recently received yet 2 more rail bus sets that refused to run 'out-of-the-box', I decided to scrap the mechanical bits of all my busses and use the bodies as a basis for a coach.

Bashing the trolleys was great fun and produced some really nice coaches imho, so I'm taking the same route with the busses.

I use two bodies, either the motor car or the trailer and will cut (*) them to form an eight window coach. Luck has it that this new body has the perfect length for a flat car !

I had some time alone in the train room last Easter Sunday. After stewing over the branch line height I decided to get down to some track work. O scale is BIG even if narrow gauge. After some more fooling around in SketchUp a plan was formed to have sections big enough to put some track and scenery on but not so big that it wouldn't be comfortable to bring in the house to work on the kitchen table.

I've lit my layout using only LED strips for over a year now and, overall, I am very happy with the results. The Ruphe and Tumbelle has very low ceilings and shadows on the backdrop were a problem with the old lighting. The good thing with LEDs is no shadows. The bad thing with LEDs is NO SHADOWS. It gives the layout a bit of an overcast day feel.

Just had our Easter weekend break so I had 2 extra days available for construction and progress has been astonishing – way beyond what I expected to achieve, which makes a change from the usual 70% achievement of plan at best.

A few photos........

I was down in the basement tonight staring at my fascia.   It was pretty easy to put up.   I used the standard 1/8 masonite, mounted smooth side out.   The color was easy enough since I matched the local Free-mo standards (my layout is built to Free-mo height standards so I can use my freemo module as part of the layout).   But I mounted it with bright silver screws.   Something I just happen to have on hand.