I expect other people also have lists in their minds of "things I wish someone would make." Mine includes the following:

- Face decals. Painting faces of figures is tedious and, for me, hopelessly inaccurate. Sticking a decal on it would be much simpler.

- Hands, perhaps etched in brass so they can be folded. Many otherwise-useful figures have poorly molded boxing-glove hands spoiling their appearance.

I'm sure I'll think of more as my brain awakens. Who else has ideas?

Happy railroading!

Bruce Randall

Hi,

last Friday I received my new lighter camera. This is just fun! It's small enough to fit on an N gauge car. By incident we had our monthly Windigipet (the steering system) meeting on the same day. There we have a demo layout with 3 circles: H0 AC on the outside, H0 DC in the middle and N on the inside. I had my lighter camera running on the N circle and a Big Boy was running on the AC (remember I'm living in Germany so a Big Boy there is extraordinary).

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.

This past Sunday, Jul 17, a non-railroading friend and I hiked the 10 miles from the Hump east of Port Alberni to the east end of Cameron Lake on Vancouver Island. The roadbed is in terrible shape as are the trestles. Though there is always talk of reopening the line, it will take millions and I doubt that it will be ever reopened. The link below show pictures of the overgrown railbed, trestles, trestle detail, old growth fir trees, general scenery, tie and tie plate piles along with flange greasers.