I've been a subscriber of the MRH site since the beginning, and have enjoyed all the great articles and tips found here. I just started a new project, so I thought it was a good excuse to start a blog about my own modeling experience.

More to follow ...

The Helix Is In; which after my induction to the “top down” club at Christmas, was supposed to be the last job!

Following advice from Alan (wizard of LK&O)  I had a rethink and redesign of the helix.

Action at night - the locos don't move because this is a photo. :=)

On September 21, 2009, Peachtree Creek decided that it wanted to branch out and see the world.  Part of that world was my basement.  I did get most of my HO-Scale rolling stock out of harm's way before the waters reached us, but a lot stayed down there.

It took nearly three days to pump out the basement. Here is one G-Guage Bachmann 4-6-0 that got unearthed from the muck once we got in there to clean up.  I'd say that she's an example of REAL extreme weathering!

this is a short vid on what progress & upgrades i have made over the past month or so. the peavine uses a ton of 4 axel units for the local switching, so i need to get a few more. going with digitrax was my best move ever. it should be fun to run the layout from my phone or pc
sorry for the super fast panning i did, i forgot that some of you requested that i slow the panning down.
enjoy the vid .....thanks for watching

vinny

Some more locos......

This first thing I wanted to do in my new layout / office room is to install good lighting.  After a bit of research I decided on using track lighting because of the flexibility in aiming the lights.  I received all of my track lighting items a few days ago and was faced with a problem: how to install this by myself?  I felt much like a "one-handed paper hanger"!

I have been looking over the design and trying to envision both operations and signaling.  I know that some may think that this is getting ahead of myself, but I thought it was important for keeping the wiring as simple as possible.  By going through this exercise, it also showed me that I was over-engineering things from an electrical/occupancy sensing perspective.

I won a bunch of Bachmann On30 trolleys on eBay, they'll end up as coaches behind a Porter or Forney loco. Removed the mechanism and put in a wee subframe to hold archbar trucks. The wheelsets are not the original On30 size, but H0 replacements:

The car drops about a ¼", looks better imho ...