With house construction and finishing basically done, it's time to get organized... Step one for organizing is to build storage shelves, which are conveniently, part of the benchwork for the railroad!

Built the benchwork shelving for under the St. Jean to South of Morris section of the layout with my youngest son tonight.

From email received yesterday.

Polk's manufacturers the AristoCraft Large Scale and RMT O Scale product lines. The AristoCraft provided one of the broadest Large Scale product lines in the industry with generally good quality at a fair price. The recession and Chinese supplier problems really hammered them hard. They will be greatly missed. Note that The Crest electronics products are being spun-off (http://shop.crest-electronics.net/main.sc) to a new operation.

The 1957 Lionel Girls Train set was a interesting experiment.  While not commercially successful it is prized by collectors.  I would submit that its commercial failure was that the pink steam locomotive did not have any context.

Today, October 1st, we will see a parade of pink baseball bats, pink sneakers and pink towel in all the professional sports arenas.  Pink trimmed race cars circle the race tracks of the US in October.  In this spirit of support, we now have a context for a pink steam locomotive and the foundation for Project 80085.