So here is a photo of my area with the stryene down, to be painted as concrete. I was testing some different paints and discovered I cannot clean the track in this large area of sunken track without my alcohol moist paper towel rubbing my painted styrene... removing it, no matter how carful I am. What can I use to matte clear coat my cement paint to protect it from 91% isopropyl alcohol or is there a paint that 91% isopropyl alcohol does not remove or effect? Thanks for anything- 

Part of what modeling does is create a sense of what a certain place and time feels like. Sometimes we're recreating personal experiences, other times we're imagining things we've heard or read about. I've been trying to squeeze in time for reading and found that there are many self-published memoirs by railroad workers available (along with a smaller number of professionally edited works). These all provide mental color and texture to my modeling endeavors and are also satisfying in themselves. 

YES! I finally got them!

An Oscar and Piker! (eBay finds)

The Oscar is half built, which is fine (though the interior colours have grown on me, the exterior I'll have to change)

The Piker is still in all of it's original plastic... WOW that's a lot of little bits of wood pieces!

My first ever "Craftsman" kits... I'll probably finish the Oscar first, seeing how it's half way finished, it will give me some clues on how best to build the Piker.

I have a large section of layout where I need to model a corn field. I looked into one of the best products on the market, JTT’s very realistic looking corn stalks, but it would be expensive when covering large areas. 

I then looked into the corn rows made by Busch and, bingo, nice looking stalks that cover quite an area per box compared to the JTT product. So, Busch it is.