I was sitting back today thinking about railroady stuff, when I came up with a quandary. Why do some folks pick a specific day and year to model, is it because everything on the layout is frozen in time except for the railroad? How many readers change up the placement of vehicles and figures, and how often if you do?

I purchased a Intermountain F unit with a LokSound Select decoder. It runs and sounds great. It's a PRR model of the freight class single stripe prototype. It has a large hole in the front pilot for the coupler. The model comes with some miscellaneous small parts for the front pilot but I think they are for the doors on the pilot, which would cover the coupler on a passenger unit.

The forums index page shows you the number of topics and also the number of new ones for each forum. If you go into a topic that has "new" ones, and look at all of the topics that have new content, your number of new ones goes to 0 (that is, no "xx new" message appears on the index page). Is there a way to wipe out all of the "new" messages on the index page? That is, the forum equivalent of "mark all as read" in an email app, for example.

The unloading grain from boxcars previous post from the other day seems to have gone off on a tangent.  Didn't most small industries like a flour mill or a distillery (Kentucky bourbon is 51% corn) just shovel the grain out of the car?  Was the pit the same width as a car door?  Were both grain doors removed or just one side?  Was the pit covered when not in use so workers or trainman didn't fall into it?

Today when unloading a grain hopper is only one hopper on the car unloaded at a time requiring a Trackmobile or locomotive to move the car?