Mea Culpa.... I completely forgot to finish off my series of layout photos from the 2012 Grand Rapids NMRA Convention. 

Skip's layout is the Arcadia & Betsy River RR, a two level standard gauge timber oriented layout. 

As soon as your walk in the door to Skip's layout you are greeted by this dramatic gorge scene:

Okay, I went over to ExactRail before the show closed so I could get some photos of their new wheelsets - they come in brass, nickel-silver (which is plated brass, I believe) and blackened. 

Now, the whole idea was to get a more prototypical appearance out of the things. That's it - and according to Blaine, the machine they got to both make the stepped appearance on the axle as well as the curves on the inside of the wheel was a whole lot more expensive than one that they could have gotten to just make them in the regular shapes. 

Joe Fugate flew into Grand Rapids on Friday for the National Train Show - and since he hadn't seen Bruce Chubb's SVOS since it was an empty basement and a plan just prior to the Valley Forge Convention in 1993, we went over there on Saturday evening.

Bruce gave us a tour of the layout from beginning to end - I still think it's a bit sobering to realize that most of Joe's Siskiyou Line is modeled in one stretch of the SVOS.

One of the advantages of being a member of the LD-SIG (ldsig.org) is going on the LD-SIG layout tour each year during the NMRA convention. This year there was a list of 20 layouts on the list - even discounting the Sunset Valley Oregon System (SVOS) which was open all week, and another layout(s) that was by appointment only, that still left us 18 layouts that we could credibly see in one day. Gentlemen... start your GPS's.

We got to 11 of them, leaving the hotel at 9:30am and finishing up with the last layout at just after 8:30pm.

This year's NMRA Convention and National Train Show are being held in Grand Rapids, Michigan, which is north of Chicago and just enough east to be in the Eastern time zone instead of the Central, as Chicago is.

Getting here was a comedy of airlines that I won't go into, aside from saying that I spent 20 hours Monday and Tuesday in airports and on airplanes and I was very happy to be reunited with my luggage when I returned to my hotel this evening after dinner.

Some of you know that my layout has had a persistent problem - I have an angled gap over the entrance to the aisle on my layout. Due to factors unforseen the angles (each different) at each end of the bridge I needed to span this gap were more than a little weird as well.

I've had three different attempts at bridging the gap with something I could swing out of the way or remove entirely, and all three of them changed sizes on me between winter and summer, tossing my track ends off.

Frustrating.

Well, here is bridge attempt #4:

Okay... Amherst is big. You kind of come  to grips with that about building #3....out of 4. 

It's almost midnight here and I don't even have all of the photos from today edited down - you're going to get what I have in sort of a free association thing. I was just snapping stuff I thought looked good or interesting, taking pictures without necessarily taking names.... 

So, starting in the comments, here we go....

Since I got to see hops harvested back in late August, I've been somewhat dissatisfied with the hops field on my layout.

So I'm "growing" some new hops for the field...

Okay, I think my original post was getting a bit long, and since I still have a lot of photos to go... let's open up a second post. I'll begin with Bowser again - I got back to them later and got some close-ups of the C-630 and C-630M locomotives, along with their new Hi-Ad and Dofasco trucks:

Saturday was busy - I spent the first part of the day shooting the photos for the Lego layout post, along with several other layouts, and then in the afternoon we did several interviews - I remember interviewing BLMA, ExactRail, the La-Ba-Ja club that won first place in the layout category (they're from Edmonton, so that got Les Halmos all excited), and Bragdon Industries. I easily may have forgotten one or two.