After building my railroad for about a year in the Library, I realized there had been a lull of about three months in which I did very little to no work at all on my layout.  I tried to isolate the problem.

And so it was the summer of 2006, and I had just got home from Geology field camp to face the prospects of moving out of my apartment and into my uncle's house on the other side of town.  My lease was up at the end of July, and so I spent the week or so that I had removing stuff; it took a load in my Fairlane, a load in my Uncle's one ton van, and then a load in his 72 F-100 to get everything out.

The Third Apartment Layout

Somewhere between now and then I misplaced my files on the third revision of the Original Apartment Layout.  Luckily there is some information here and there, and all the photographs, since I stored them in a separate location.

I had a lot of work planed to today, and I was even doing quite well with it.  But as i was going along, I realized I was making shortcuts and mistakes left and right, and the results were unnecessarily ugly to look at.

I realized I've been completing projects but otherwise leaving the peanut gallery out of the fray!  My apologies - here's a couple links!!

Wait a second!!  Ok, I say links because I've been trying something newer but not new.  I used to maintain a website on geocities, which neatly contained all my railroad projects and too much else.  Ugh.  Then they shut geocities down one night a couple years back and that was it, no more geocities.  So I no longer post a website anymore.

I just had a rather sobering moment.

One of my favorite industires in Arizona railroading is the cottonseed mill.  The Cotton idustry is primarily interested in the cotton ball fiber, even though each ball also contains seeds.  As a result, the cotton gin is used to separate the valuable fibers form the unwanted seeds.  The seeds were then at one point regarded waste.

The Nice and Easy Between a Rock and a Hard Place

The First Apartment Layout

The First layout started so simple I could have laughed if I saw what it would become.

The original plan started as a 2’x4’ shelf module with three tracks at a base level, two tracks at a higher level, and then two more tracks on a third level.  Naturally, I then decided I wanted to connect the three levels together!!  Thus, I built the benchwork over my bed, a large 4’x7’, and then imagined up a mammoth of plans, by all means.