Most of the sites focus mainly on midwest and East coast prototypes and layouts. We out West love our SP, UP and ATSF. This is a pefect compliment to our hobby. Joe and Bernie this is awesome.

I am currently in the process of building a 3x5 test layout. The givens reflect things that I wanted to cover to prepare myself for the next layout. In some cases, I did things in a way less suitable for a small layout in order to prepare myself for the next layout.

Givens:

I have signed on to Model Railroad Hobbyist as a contributing editor for a column on N Scale subjects. I have started this journal to solicit feedback from N Scale modelers with suggestions on what you would like to see in the column. So if you have an idea or subject that you think needs coverage post it here, or drop me a private email at info@alkemscalemodels.com

Many of you may have heard of the Helicon Focus software program but are not entirely sure of what it is or does. SImply put, this program takes multiple pictures of the same subject but with different focal points and glues them together selectingthe input picture with the best focus for each point of the output picture. The results can be astounding.

Rather than blog here AND on my own, I created a personal BLOG a while back, http://www.trainfanatic.blogspot.com.  I hope you'll come & check it out.  As always, I'm looking for comments/feedback.  Please post on the blog & not here, as I won't be checking this page at all... thanks!

R/,

Norm

Sometimes a photograph just seems to pop off the page at you. I've found sharp (in focus) photos with lots of contrast often do this for me. Often, when it comes to model railroads, this means taking the railroad outdoors and photographing it in sunlight. Face it, it's darned hard to duplicate sunlight indoors. We're lookin' to make use of the full dynamic range of your camera here - maxxing out the range from darkest to lightest.

So! Let's see what you've got in the way of hi-contrast model train (or real train) photographs.

Starting on Monday, September 1st, we're going to be posting totally brand new free video content to MRH Theater - and we'll continue doing that each and every Monday. We're calling it MOVIE MONDAY!

The new video content will be marked with a red NEW VIDEO! so that it's easy to spot.

Plan to visit the MRH site every week on Monday and enjoy the fresh new video content we've posted in MRH Theater. Just another example of MRH leveraging the "new media wave" - to give you rich media delivered completely free via the internet!

So tell all your hobby friends - it's Free Movie Monday every Monday in MRH THeater!

Here's a video demonstrating how I use Google Earth to study the prototype structure layout in Roseburg, Oregon and to plan the structure placement on my model of Roseburg. Click the image below to play the video.

Enjoy! Google Earth is simply amazing - video's the only way to really demonstrate it effectively!

By the way, this is an example of the rich media content we hope to regularly include in Model Railroad Hobbyist magazine.

If you're saying you prefer a paper magazine to reading a magazine on a computer, then you don't really understand MRH.

First of all, MRH is free - and next it's an interactive magazine. I like to say if a still image is worth a thousand words, then rich media is worth a million words. Many of the MRH articles will have rich media material - and that's only possible because the magazine has been designed from the ground up to be easy and entertaining to read on a computer. All totally free. Click to subscribe for free.

 Video playback problems? Try playing this video from our mirror site.
 Or download a copy (18MB) and play it back locally.

The area highlighted in yellow below represents the area of my layout plan that I'm focusing on. I've noted the various structures in my plan for this area. Zoom in to the larger image and study the various structures and their labels. I'll speak more to each specific structure in future posts to this blog.

Click image to enlarge

HI..

Well after a long time modeling the PRR and the Frisco I decided to try my hand at building a GWR branchline. I have been collecting mainlly loco and rolling stock plus the track parts but still no layout plan.Stuart in OZ