Annually the Ottawa Valley Garden Railway Society (OVGRS) opens it's doors to large scale modelers to come and run this point to point operating large scale railroad for three days.

Hi all,

Posting from the UK so access to the prototype isn't easy!

I'd like to know whether CN and CP share grain hoppers in the same way that a manifest freight will often include cars from private fleets or foreign roads.

I know that the Canadian federal and provincial governments have bought fleets which are then allocated to either CN or CP for maintenance, (e.g. Alberta's ALNX is a CN allocated car and ALPX is a CP car) but I don't know whether trains are routinely made up from a mix of each railroad's cars.

Something has been itching me recently, and I think I’ve just figured out what it is.  I’m going to be modeling the area I grew up in, specifically the North Shore of Vancouver BC. I love the old paint styles of CN, CP and the two-tone green of BC Rail that I saw as a kid, I’ve personally never seen anything else that tickles my fancy like those paint schemes, new or old. But I also have an unhealthy attraction to brand new motive power.

Following a discussion on photography and depth of field  I downloaded a 4-week trial of some computer software called Helicon focus

[url]http://www.heliconsoft.com/heliconfocus.html[/url]

Simply put, the software takes a number of partially-focused photos and layers them on top of one another to produce a single perfectly focused shot.