NMRA 2008 Convention Photos

I’ve dumped all of the photos I took in Anaheim up to my Google Picassa account here.

Getting Back on Track

Yes it’s been almost another month since my last post, I’ve been busy at work catching up with everything that I missed during the time that I was out for the NMRA convention and then my other travels since then.  I’m planning on spending most of my time this upcoming holiday weekend working on railroad related items, I’ve got a lot of stuff which I purchased in Anaheim to organize and figure out what needs to be done with it to get it ready.

On the track planning side of things, I’ve got a good idea of what i want to put in my Hershey track plan, I’ll be uploading that before the end of the weekend, I’ve been giving a lot of thought to the Lebanon area of the layout since that’s what I need to look at planning out next.  I’ve never really seen a good yard diagram of the yard west of Lebanon, but I know it supported the local trains that ran along the line plus interchanging with the Pennsylvania Railroad and Cornwall Railroad (until 1964).

The other important item that I’ve been looking at is staging,  I’ve never liked any of my staging plans for the double deck layout that I am planning on building.  Because of the space that I’ve been looking at it was most likely that both of the yards would end up being stub ended yards, difficult to re-stage and almost impossible to just run a train non-stop when needed.  On the LDSIG tour in Anaheim I saw Bruce Morden’s HO scale Southern Pacific Santa Barbara Subdivision. Bruce is using the concept of X-factor staging which had first been mentioned in Model Railroad Planning 2004.  The idea is that the staging is arranged so that you can back a train into the staging once it has completed it’s run across the layout without interfering with the main line.  I’ll have to see if I can dig up a photo of what Bruce has there since I’ve been thinking about putting that into my plan to see how it fits.