Finally have some free time with all my lumber bought and my new drill and impact ready to go...and need to have my car looked at. So I'll make another post while I wait for that before I go home and start building.

The layout will go in the living room, as I am in a one bedroom apartment. AND my fiancé is on-board with it, if for no other reason than that my train stuff takes up her side of the closet right now so I have to build it so I can move that into the cabinets the modules will sit on lol

The guitar, TV, and lamp will be relocated and it will fit behind the couch with no issues. I will have to move the couch out to work on the layout or operate, but that's an acceptable compromise for me in an apartment. I am basically using the TOMA approach as I know I'll be moving at least once, so while I plan to scenic over the joint so it's not visible while it's set up, I will just need to cut through the scenery to split them apart and move them.

Now for the back story. I am modeling a freelance northern transcon during the transition era. I plan to model the west coast end of the railroad in Oregon. While I plan to have interchanges with real railroads at some point in the future on a larger layout, I will be freelancing all locations. I chose to do a freelance road mainly for the creative and design aspect of it. I loved being able to design my own paint scheme and being able to chose what equipment and styles my railroad will use. I am still in the process of coming up with the full back story, but I will be posting more whenever I do. For now, here's the paint scheme on an SD40-2. It was inspired by the Rock Island's short lived Route of the Rockets scheme (that will be part of the back story