It’s been a busy month! I have been all over the place, working on this-and-that… I have been working on a custom sculpt in my other hobby, I have been helping people move, I have been smoking good stogies and going to comedy shows with a friend (who happens to be on-stage every time! Funny guy). Last night, I sat back and enjoyed a nice generic Dominican smoke while watching a Tarantino flich, and I spent half the movie daydreaming about a new, bigger layout….. I think it would be prudent of me, at this point, to get some wood together and get my butt in gear building the table for the 2×4 layout…. that puppy’s not gonna build itself!! Not a problem… I know where to bget everything, from the sideboards to the legs to the plexiglass (1/4″) top. Last thing to do is to build a couple controls for it, likely using 12V rechergeable batteries and some radio shack voltage regulator dials…. that way it’s kid-friendly speed-wise, and no cords to get in the way.  We’ll see….  

Recent buys to talk about! I’ll post pics as soon as I can take ’em (another stand-up night tonight haha)…. picked up a set of Rapido AT&SF “Shorty” passenger cars, and Arnold AT&SF rib-side streamlined cars…. 7 in all. Half with proper couplers, so less work for me! I now have a consist (imaginary and non-proto as it may be) to pull behind those stellar Intermountain FT’s!! That’s pretty exciting…. despite the fact that the majority of my equipment is 50’s Northern Pacific…. eh, who cares? It looks fine to me! Especially the dome car and the observation car (rounded end)- truly classic.  

AT&SF Passenger train

On the Northern railways front, I have picked up a couple goodies, including a set of three Burlington grain cars (which are quite period correct) and a SW9/1200 in Great Northern scheme. All on a severe discount so guilt is nowhere to be found! Not to mention the sweet little GN short Semi trailers- part of my layout will be dedicated to the TOFC (Trailer-on-flat-car) setup so common in the old days but less common on layous now…. I picked up some off-roadname trailers (40′) for DIRT cheap at the LHS, and they’ll be receiving a full repaint in Northern Pacific sheme quite soon (where is the link for that paint? Oh wait I remember!) so see the pic below.  

  

 Now the next big project is starting work on a new set of layout benchwork without getting killed by my lovely girl. She’s really rather understanding but there’s always that looming fear when I get out the Visa 😉  Wish me luck… I had in mind a relatively simple layout, something very space-efficient and yet expandable. I think I have settled on an idea here…. there’s a standard most of you should be familiar with, called NTRAK, which is a group who has designed some very straightforward guidelines to building interlocking sections of a model railroad which would be universally compatible and easy to build. Their standard is rather large, though, and allows for long runs of three or more trains. I have nooooooo such need. In fact, my layout will not only be focused moreso on scenery, but on the quality of train consists versus quantity of trains run. I see two distinct ends of the spectrum with N scale folks- the guys who build layouts for operations realism and the guys who build them for simplicity (put a train down and watch it run in circles!). I am neither interested in reflecting prototype operations nor would I be happy with a circle of track and a Brio train…. so the happy medium, for me, is going to be a layout where I can both run trains for fun and run them with a purpose. That isn’t too much to ask, is it? So without the space required to run NTRAK and with the necessity of something bigger than a coffee table, I am aiming for a four-module layout that has the best of several worlds- It will offer two larger end modules for large-raduis curves, and two narrower center modules for long runs in between. I know I posted about this previously, and at this point I am about ready to commit it to wood. Best of all? In tight space situations I could actually use only the two end modules, if I lay my track right 🙂 Need to clean the garage first before the sawing and drilling begins, but the result should be akin to this, without the lopsided-ness: 

   

The creator of this layout has been mentioned here before- he’s a pro Z-scale modeler and he has done some incredible wood lasercutting kits in N and Z scale. I need to remember to pick up a kit from him… check out his old site (if you haven’t already), HERE.   

For the moment, I am going to sign off and do some more mental sketching, so keep your eyes peeled! I’ll snap some shots of my diorama very soon… 

-B