In my first blog post, I wrote about how I am only now revisiting the hobby after many years.  I am having a lot of fun and I've enjoyed seeing my ten year-old son delighted by moving a loco and a car on some test track I set up.  After  obtaining the necessary easements from family, I have been thinking a lot about the “Where, What, and When” idea of what to do for a layout.  This will likely be a shelf switching layout for the time being.

Hi everyone,

I have a multi part question... I am primarily modeling 1954 but I have set my railroad up to change for multiple eras. I am now looking to 1969. My railroad is the GN and I am familiar with their changes in the 1960's, "circus cars, glacier green, and big sky blue" but I am less familiar with rolling stock changes around the nation at the same time. The GN was acquiring covered hoppers but the vast majority of their fleet was 55% boxcars and they were one of the few railroads making good money during this time. My questions are as follows.

I have been using SCARM to design the new railroad and since I am still a good 6 months away from actually building it, I thought I would try my hand at using SCARM to design some structures. Wanted to start small so I have done 3 trailers that will go into Frog Hollow Trailer Park. I think they came out pretty nice.

I am building a portable layout that will fold up like an ironing board into a cabinet. I want to add over head lighting and even more importantly, i want to add a proscenium arch to fram everything. The problem is that I max height the layout can be from bottom of track to top of the arch would be about 14. The base of the layout is 2 inches so it leaves me with 12 inches to work with. Take an inch off of that for lighting wiring and diffuser thickness and I am down to about 11. I feel like I am just out of luck on this aspect and that will simply not be a tall enough viewing area.