Jim's Chopper

I sweet talked my brother into making me a chopper I saw online.
It works so well, much easier than trying to use a razor blade.

Thanks Bro, love ya.

Method to my madness

 I thought I might explain some of the method to my madness as it was commented to me that I was "All over the board." :-P
 I love modeling, I have found that I even love scratch building a model so much more than putting together kits, to me it is incredible to see something come of nothing.
 My Railway is not just to have a train to play with but to have an excuse to create models and terrain, it may take a while to get to the point where I can play with the train but it will never ever be "Completed" as there is always something to do, add, modify but that's alright as it gives me something to occupy my mind and hands in a productive way.
  In laying out my track I found it very difficult to envision where everything was supposed to go, I had no buildings, I had no bridges and hardly any money, all I had is track and foam, so I was at the craft store picking up something for my wife when I saw their pile of basswood sheets, and sticks and they were cheap so I gave it a try, I made 2 houses of basswood, well mostly made, cats got to one and the other is still floating around somewhere, but they will make place holders so I have an idea of where to put the track, how much room I need to leave for houses and roads, I need to make a couple buildings so that I can do a downtown district as well.
 I built a bridge this weekend, it is a girder/deck bridge more modern and I will probably put it more towards the middle of the layout by the city, and am going to do an older trestle bridge further back more in the wilderness/forest area, and maybe some simple stacked bridges here and there in the forest. (where they stack logs criss/cross on top of each other)
 I do not like building things around the terrain, I would much rather build the terrain around the objects, or at least have an idea of where it should go, what size etc.
 So in that regard is why I have stopped working on laying out the track for the moment and am more focused on building some models to go into the railway to help lay it out in a way that will look the best.
 So stay with me if you are interested in watching it grow and seeing what it turns out to be, as I don't even have a definitive idea of how it will all look in the end.

Scale Converter

I got tired of trying to figure out how many millimeters a foot converted to in N-Scale so I wrote a program that will do all the conversion for you.
Change any field and all the others auto update and the scale can be changed, I deal with N-Scale so the default is set to N of course.

This should make scratch building much, much easier.

Scratch built girder bridge

I need some bridges so this was my first scratch built bridge

Time to turn this pile of sticks into a bridge.