As usual I'm too busy building the layout to blog about it!  Some new stuff this week:

Starting to rough out Lubkin Canyon and the tunnel that gets the railroad into the canyon. The standard gauge to Mojave runs off the edge of the layout at bottom right.  The elevated line on the inside of the canyon is one of the switchback handles.  More:

Sorry, it's been a long time since I've posted anything. I wanted to make this post because I've recently become a glass insulator collector, and eventually I realized that I might be able to lend some food-for-thought here. See, most people just have simple poles without wires if they even bother with the poles, and they all look identical, full racks of insulators, maybe not even colored like insulators. I saw a article in a MRR magazine by Pelle Søeborg on trackside telegraph poles.

I model the Latta Subdivision of the Soo Line in southern Indiana in the early 1990s.  Seriously, the Soo Line served southern Indiana?  Yes, it actually did after it took over the Milwaukee.  During that time it had about a train a day of bridge traffic to the Norfolk Southern in Louisville, but its bread and butter was hauling coal from multiple loadouts up and down the line.  The Latta sub was isolated from the rest of the Soo Line since it used the ex C&EI from Terre Haute to Chicago and the ex Monon from Bedford to Louisville.

To All: Today I present a decision many of us model railroaders face, namely, do I install lights and animation to my

           layout? I will phrase the question like this--Pros and Cons. Pros-1) Lights sure look great for night scenes

          in buildings and strret lights 2) Animation is a great conversation subject, such as a working coal dumper.