Thursday, March 15, 2007

Quick Photo: I'm starting to like the town side of the layout


While shooting some photos of the mech reefers to show off on the Railwire Weathering Forum, I decided to take this grabber of 7883 posed on the team track on the town side of my current layout.
I was alway very nervous about getting this side of the layout right, but shots like this are starting to make me feel like I'm at least headed in the right direction.

Wednesday, March 14, 2007

Alan Curtis's models live on!


Discovered on the Atlas forum (forum TOPIC_ID=36268), it looks like Alan Curtis's awesome (even though I've never bought one, being much more of a cheapskate RTR guy than I'll ever admit) cast metal kits will continue to be available.

This is great news, since it had seemed that there was a chance that these great models would no longer be available. Also good news is that the new owner, Peter Harris, knows that the forums exist. If this is a good or bad thing remains to be seen, but good luck to Peter and anyone else at "N Scale Kits" (http://www.nscalekits.com/), the new company producing the models, you're sailing into scary waters.

Alan Curtis's departure from the scene was one of the things that initially got me thinking about the state of the industry. Cottage manufactures (like ACM) have come and gone for a long time, but I had really hoped he had more staying power, since I know he had a number of interesting things in the works. The additional good news is that these new things that he was working on are still going to be done by NSK, which bodes VERY well for North Country Modelers.

First post


After a while of reading the various train fora, I have decided that there is some content that just belongs in a blog.

There is a lot of intelligent discussion on these forums, from simple how to things, like paving a road, to discussions about upcoming products (and the pondering of just WHAT Kato is thinking these days), to discussions about why we are into trains. However, there is also a lot of plain bullshit on these forums as well. Posts about "how do I make my engines run in reverse", "why aren't my handrails installed for me?" etc dilute the high value content in these forums, and help obscure the real jems that they provide.

I intend to discuss these issues that come up on the forums, cutting through the minor and day to day issues, and focus on big things about the hobby. The health of the industry, why we model, big product discussions, responses to published articles, things like this (and maybe some discussion about my layout and website), these are the types of things I want to cover.

I hope that my readers find what I have to say interesting, and add to the discussion by posting replies in the comments below.