From my workbench

5th Layout Plan Complete


Well, this will be my 5th and hopefully final layout. I signed a 99 year land lease with my wife and I will start to tear out walls and installing electrical this winter. The space will be 15' x 31'.
This is a 90% HO and 10% HOn3 layout.
This will be based during the World War II era.
Southern Pacific & Cotton Belt.
It is a dual level layout with a helix (Top level shown). 2 main lines, 3 yards and 2 locomotive terminals including turntables. My plan is to hand lay all of the exposed track and switches.
I am running an Easy DCC system, currently only have 2 power districts (but may require more), 2 throttles are mounted on the control panel (see future posting on this project) as well as one wireless throttle for walk around.

Image of the month

I was born and raised in El Paso, Texas. As a kid I would visit nearby Cloudcroft New Mexico. I would explore and admire the old wooden railroad trestle located at Mexican Canyon. Here are a couple of photographs from the past and present of that very trestle. I plan on stratchbuilding this trestle on my layout.




Thanks to the hard work of volunteers this trestle is being saving from further degradation. See more information about their efforts here; http://www.fs.fed.us/r3/lincoln/projects/trestle.htm

New Model Railroad Magazine

I have been introduced to a new on-line Model Railroad magazine created by Joe Fugate. He is the same craftsman that brought you the DVD set mentioned on this web-site. Joe's vision is to bring a free, yes I said free, magazine to the hobby that includes state of the are web technology.

He is planning to launch the first edition in January 2009. I highly recommend this as a resource for the modeler out there.
If you get a chance check out the web site at

http://www.model-railroad-hobbyist.com/

I am having a blast just meeting folks and posting and reading the blogs...