The Big Hairy Audacious Goal

My friend, Mark Dance, is someone I admire. He is an amazingly productive model railroader: in less than eight years, he took his quadruple deck Columbia and Western from paper to the cover of Railroad Model Craftsman, and a regular feature on the local operating scene. When I asked him at this weekend’s VanRail operating […]

Quantity Surveying

As we near the end of bench work construction, it’s time to start thinking about the track. For some reason, I don’t feel much like working on any of the actual construction projects this evening. So, I whipped up a quick spreadsheet to estimate the quantities of things like ties and rail and so on. […]

The Plan

Originally published on Model Railroad Hobbyist, March 9 I should come clean: Pembroke I, the layout I described in Model Railroad Planning back in 1999 never really got off the ground. Oh sure, I built enough to take some photos for the article, but for a number of reasons, Pembroke it was unsatisfying. It languished […]