Another Video: Tools & Tricks of the Trade

Shot another video the other night on tools that make modeling easier and a few tricks that also help you out.  Enjoy!

Latest video is out: 2019 April Update

In this episode I talk about the back date on the layout and a vehicle review.  There is a small section without audio.  It's towards the end when I review freight cars.  The joys of new video editing software!

An Ops session yesterday on a D&H N scale layout

Finally got a chance to operate on Chris Artale N scale layout yesterday.  He lives over in Madison County to the west and models the D&H in the late 1960's. After a relaxing hour ride over, the crew was treated to an excellent lunch and ops started right after that.  I visited Chris's layout for a tour after a James River NMRA meet a couple of years ago, and the stars finally lined up to operate on it.  His layout is in his spacious basement and only takes up about half of it.  Very relaxed atmosphere by the crew of 8 and lots of laughs.  I've done a few op sessions in the past but this was my biggest one yet, plus it had a dispatcher and operated by track warrants.  All new to me but made it realistic to run a railroad.  Thank you Chris for the invite and a great Wednesday afternoon running trains. 

Beautiful view of the Blue Ridge Mountains coming from the town of Orange.  Yes Orange that I model on my layout.

Awesome entrance to Chris's house

One of my many Track Warrants on the day.

Great handout of the crew with all the valuable info in it.

Inside the pamphlet

Map of the layout.  The staging yard is self staging!

Different trains on the layout

Don runs the yard at Ft. Edward

The entire layout.

My first train was a switching job out of Ft. Edward to the Fenimore Branch.

Lots of switching here at the paper plant.

The locomotive facility at Whitehall Yard.

Feedmill at Ganesevort with Chris on the left and John on the right checking out staging.

My second train was a passenger train 34 or 35.

Whitehall yard takes up the entire backside of the layout.

Here is 34 or 35 waiting at the end of the Whitehall yard limits.

An empty coal drag waits at Ft. Ann.  

Happy Easter and spring cleaning

Wow it's been 2 months since my last post in February and really nothing to post on the railroad or the like.  But want to keep my faithful & patient followers updated.  The last post talked about some new power for the layout.  A few more posts ago, I revealed the desire to backdate the layout.  So I have been doing some purging of cars and locos in order to get to around 1987-88.  So all CSX patched cars are gone and most graffiti is not out and about.  Of course those were thrown into my excess pile for train shows and several sold just yesterday at a smaller show.  I also purged some of my loco projects and those also sold easily yesterday.  I will continue to do this until I get down to a only a few projects.  It seems that when I have several projects going on at the same time, that's a turn off for me.   That makes it a challenge of even walking into the layout room to get anything done. 

So Spring Break this week for me.  I hope to get a few more things done and hopefully a post or two!

Go this painted on a warmer weekend about a month ago.  Time for decals and hooking up lights and eventually the sound decoder.  This is a SDP35