The challenge was thrown down while I was packing up the house for a cross-country move. Everything has arrived in the new Texas home and quite a bit is unpacked. The hobby room has been staked out and I'm contemplating two prototype locations as inspiration for the next layout. Two slogans are beginning to dominate the project; Keep It Simple Stupid, and Keep Moving Forward. I've posted more detail on the room and the prototypes on my blog:

http://designbuildop.hansmanns.org/

Like many, many of you, I struggle (and generally fail) at keeping a clean organized workbench.  As I have started and worked through projects over the years, I've tried just about everything to keep my projects organized - butter tubs, old greeting card boxes, even discarded instrument packages from scientific instruments!  See, I like to keep all the detail parts, replacement couplers, etc together in a single place while I work on a model, so I can just pick it up, work on it, and then set it down without spending time trying to hunt everything out of my on bench storage

One of the advantages of being a member of the LD-SIG (ldsig.org) is going on the LD-SIG layout tour each year during the NMRA convention. This year there was a list of 20 layouts on the list - even discounting the Sunset Valley Oregon System (SVOS) which was open all week, and another layout(s) that was by appointment only, that still left us 18 layouts that we could credibly see in one day. Gentlemen... start your GPS's.

We got to 11 of them, leaving the hotel at 9:30am and finishing up with the last layout at just after 8:30pm.

The spline roadbed helix story continues.  I have other projects around the house so I have only been working on this project part of the time as well as learning and documenting the process as I go. New pictures and a movie were added on 4 and 9 August to this section.

It's been a few weeks since I've been able to work on this, life & work get in the way. Sigh.

Bridges- my main goal for this past month was to figure out my bridge situation. I was only half pleased with what I had for abutments- some boxy looking piers made from styrene that I knew I would have a hard time making look like cement; even with fogged primer-colored and cement-colored paint, I wasn't getting the look I wanted. For this problem, MR actually was relevant and timely! A recent article by Pelle Soeberg talked about casting his own tunnel portals. That looked like fun, so I gave it a shot, with some surplus styrene sheet I had around.

Wow, I wasn't sure this one was ever going to happen! After making the switch from N to HO I made pretty good headway on getting the basic part of the new layout up but then  after getting it to the point seen in the second progress report, it was like I hit a brick wall.  I just didn't ever seem to feel like working on the layout despite the fact that I've has some mandatory four day work weeks and had scheduled vacation days around the forced unpaid days so I'd have longer weekends.

I found this after I had already started my layout blog, at www.westcoastrails.whsites.net.  You can see earlier posts there.

This year's NMRA Convention and National Train Show are being held in Grand Rapids, Michigan, which is north of Chicago and just enough east to be in the Eastern time zone instead of the Central, as Chicago is.

Getting here was a comedy of airlines that I won't go into, aside from saying that I spent 20 hours Monday and Tuesday in airports and on airplanes and I was very happy to be reunited with my luggage when I returned to my hotel this evening after dinner.