I just got finished doing a customer demo from my office / railroad room and all the sudden was feeling thankful!

This is sort of what my "office" used to look like when I was a "cube dweller" before I transferred to the remote team:

YUCK!  I remember those days well and don't miss them at all!

Here's the view from in my office now:

Anybody know if Bearcomarine is still in business? Reason I ask is I've become very interested in building an HO scale model of a McMyler Coal Dumper. I already know of the Garden State Model Railroad clubs working model and the post here on MRH about the "N" scale model that was started but looks like the poster never finished. I've also surfed the net and downloaded every picture I could find.

I looked at the Bearco's site. It's still up but if you click on purchasing plans you get a 404 error.

The older I get the more difficult it gets to rummage around under the layout, on the floor, trying to complete wiring, switch machine installation, etc.  There are ways of easing this somewhat (e.g. using suitcase connectors for wiring) but I'm wondering how far some of you may have gone to address this.  Since I tend to do all the work myself I'd be interested in any tricks/tips/hints you may have on ways to work from the top down instead of bottom up.  Suggestions for switch machines, accessing wiring for maintenance, etc.

So I recently got a really impressive piece from a family member that used to work for EMD, it is a large wooden E8 a styling model used to try out paint schemes. This one is in the B&O herald minus words and shield. So what else do you have hiding in your collections? Let's see it here.