First off, I have a confession.  I am not a carpenter.  I have never framed a house or built a deck or raised a barn.  Therefore, benchwork intimidates me.  My first layout, a small switching layout I had as a kid was built by my dad.  My second layout was assisted by my dad.  My last layout was entirely built by myself, but it was unstable...and that's being generous.  I knew going into this that in order for this to be an enjoyable layout to work on and run, it would have to have the best benchwork I'd ever built in my life.

Like I mentioned in my first entry, I had a design for a 25’x25’ double decked layout, featuring not only the entire TS run from Stockton to Turlock (excluding the Manteca Branch) but SP as well.  It was a cool “mushroom design” and I’m still convinced that it would work – given the space of course.  However, this is the space I ended up with:

Have you ever had something that turned out wrong, and then it ended up being more right than you could have imagined?  I had that experience yesterday.  Since the early days of planning my double-decked Tidewater Southern, I had assumed that I would build the Foster Farms Feed Mill that sits just west of Turlock, and in fact, I set about doing just that on this layout.  It's a really cool facility:

Recently, I was paid a bit of a complement.  I was told that "not many people do what you do", in reference to my choice of prototype that I model.  That's a bit of a double edged complement though.  On the one hand, hey, cool, I'm doing something fairly unique, and on the other hand, well, jeez...is there anyone else that does what I do?  So I figured I'd write a bit about it, since I also enjoy writing, and maybe, just maybe, someone out there is interested in this as well.