Took delivery of my Atlas N scale ALCo S-2 yesterday. First, I'm blown away by how much volume the little speaker puts out. This thing is loud! It will soon be making a trip to the LokSound programmer for some fine tuning! The quality of the sound puts to shame my MRC decoder-equipped SD-9. 

So after years of thoughts and CAD printouts and revisions, I had enough. So I decided to do a mock up and see how it fits in scale instead of on paper.

Inspiration is WM Port Covington in the 40's. I have always like ship modeling and trains so I am combining both. My original room of 30x14 got cut in half a couple years ago and it really stunted my design process.  So I figured smaller maybe better because of the detail involved. Below are some of the photos that I am using for inspirations.

There have been many excellent model railroaders that I have admire over the years. So many, that I would be remiss if I tried to name them all. But two that come right to mind for me are David Barrow and Lance Mindheim. Many years ago I read about David Barrows Cat Mountain and Santa Fe and saw how realism can be acheived through simplicity.  His original CM&SF wasn't overly scenicked. It wasn't overly landscaped. But it looked right. Than a few years later he wrote about dominos, 2' x 4' boxes that you basically assemble right on the workbench.

I have for the last 35 years modeled in N scale and will continue to do so.  I find I have room for a 10 to 12 foot HO switching layout.  My problem is that I do not know much about the reliability of HO locos other than Kato.  I am considering the following five locos.     1)  Life-Like Proto 2000 S3    2)  Kato NW2    3)  Bachmann RS-3   4)  Bachmann 44 tonner   5)  Atlas S-4.     I will be running DC only.