Cleaning off the rust.

Nine years!?! After a move to a new city, a new job, plus a move to a new house, things have been busy and my railroad plans have taken a backseat to life. Our new house has a large basement that has been largely unused. My research/teaching loads have evened out to the point where I am not always working on something new. And of course I've been missing the hobby - I'd like to take stuff out of boxes and run some trains.

Having family over for Thanksgiving this year gave me the final push "over the edge," so to speak. My niece is interested in trains and I set up a small loop of track on top of a couple of hollow-core doors. The curves were too tight to accommodate anything but a few switchers.

Circus Tyme

The Spineless Circus has pulled it's merry wagon train and hitched up at Andrea's Buzzing About: blog. Go and take a peek at the latest in spineless musings!

A bit of an update

Progress on the railroad has been slow - one could aptly describe it as glacial. Due to a recent job offer, we will be moving, and as such the layout is currently dismantled. However, the modular design proved it's merit and will be reassembled when time and space permit. For now, there is research to be done, and rolling stock to be scratchbuilt. Hopefully these projects will find themselves on these pages in the not too distant future.

Layout planning in 3D

The above photo is the corner of the layout where Two Harbors will go. I put some boxes and cars to mock up the scene and get a sense of what things will look like and where things will fit. Looking at the original 2-D plan, it was now obvious that the wye wouldn't fit and generally interfered more than it helped. So out the door that went. That sent all the other track on that side into chaos, but with the foam base, I can just plop a piece of flextrack down, pin it temporarily and see what it looks like. I can go over the track centers later and put down permanent track and roadbed once I get it to my liking.

Layout draft

Here's the layout after a few drafts.



The main points:

• Handlaid code 55 (perhaps some ME flex to speed things up


• Gray is staging


• 42" sidings to accomodate six car long trains made of 34' boxes


• Duluth, Knife River, and Two Harbors stations for passenger trains

more to follow...

The story so far

A photo of my space in the basement, you can see the lighting is set up, and the wall brackets with the modules are assembled as well. At the moment, I am working on the track plan - Two Harbors will be on the right, with the ore and merchandise docks taking up the rightmost module. Knife river will be on the left, and behind the point of the photo will eventually be Endion.

The space in the basement was a den when we bought the house (couches came with it - not a bad thing), so my modeling goals included keeping the use of the space as a game and TV room as well. The halogen track lights show up as uneven spots, but these are not as obvious in person, and when I take photos of models on the layout, I can reposition the lights to make things more even - consider it the lighting framework for the stage which is the layout. Perhaps in the future, I'll get some blue rope lights and set up a night scene as well.

Tales of a layout

Just a placeholder to discuss my HO model railroad layout based on the lakefront line from Duluth to Two Harbors, MN. Discussion of various aspects of the layout will go here, along with photos. More of a journal than a blog per-se. Unless there are lots of other choo-choo bloggers out there I suspect I will be the only one here.