I was on a hobby shops Trek yesterday "317miles round trip" 8 Model Railroad specialties Shops in 9&1/2 Hours. A few of the Items I was looking for were decoders for 2ea 2-8-0 C-16 & 2ea 2-8-0 C-19 D&RGW light steam engines Soundtraxx DSD-101LC Decoders  for them & the RGS Galloping Goose #5  DCC/Sound card Tsunami TSU-1000 DCC w/Sound and 5 ea 0.78X1.56X0.31 Oval Speakers for all 5 engines and 14 differently numbered new Rolling stock by Blackstone in HOn3 as well as numerous accessories and books and DVD's.

While sitting in my Train room this Morning I realized today is Thanksgiving in America. I know other countries have similar celebrations but for U.S. citizens it's our end of harvest season party and is celebrated on the last Thursday of November. It was actually started before America was called The United States By the early settlers and the Native American Indians coming together with that years Harvest grown by the settlers and the wild Game the natives brought to a feast celebrating Peace of the two peoples.

While its good to spend time letting folks know about all the modeling we're doing, it's also good to take a break and look at how someone else has done it.   I did just that this past weekend, with a trip up the line to the N-scale NYS&A of Todd Treaster.  Todd hosts open houses through out the year, and this was the first one I had the chance to attend.

Coming in the basement door, the yard sits off to the right - and what a yard it is:

Well, there's no point to calling something a chainsaw layout, if you don't cut it up. Yesterday, I decided it was time for my first (4x8) layout.

This layout served it's purpose for the past two years, namely

1. got me into the hobby

2. allowed me to try some things

3. allowed me to run trains while working on the next one

But more and more recently it's just taken up physical space, and become a collection point for tools and junk. I also need to put in a support post for the house in what was basically the same space.