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New! Read all about our most recent operating session on the Housatonic
Railroad! Click Here or on the button to the
right to see photos of the session and read about how everything
went.
For those folks who came to visit during the 2006 North-Eastern Region
convention, thank you very much. It is always great to show off the layout
and I'm especially happy that many of the people who have participated in making
it happen were here to hear your praises. I had a great time being your
host and so did my friends, and we're really glad you came. Some photos of
the layout during the open house are up in the Construction journal, I hope
you'll have a look at them.
We also just had our first official operating session recently on November 1st. It wasn't perfect, but we had a lot of fun and learned some things about the railroad (like having three trains at Dock Yard at once is not a good thing). There's some pictures and a description in the Construction Journal along with the regular updates. I suppose I'll have to create a separate operations journal sometime soon to keep the activities separate.
If you have not looked at the layout virtual tour in a while (or at all) you might like to have a new look -- I've done quite a bit of work on them lately, updating them with better, more accurate descriptions and newer photos of each area under construction. A lot of these are photos that have already appeared in the construction journal, but here they are grouped by location rather than chronologically. Hopefully it will make things easier to understand what's happening in the basement when looking at photos and the map together.
Greetings and thank you for stopping by. Welcome to the website that describes all that we are doing on my 1892 Housatonic Railroad layout. I hope you enjoy the visit and check out everything that we're doing. There are a lot of creative and talented people who help me out with this, and it makes me very proud to show off their work as well as my own.
It is well into 2006 now and we are still making great progress every week towards building up the layout, and we continue to do great work that I'm really proud of. It has been about two and a half years since we started (December 2003) and we are so far beyond where I ever expected to be. I would love to take credit for it but the credit belongs to my friends. Friends who come over week after week and help us inch closer and closer to the day we can call this layout finished. I'd be nowhere without all of them. I hope you'll visit the Construction Journal and see all the work they have done and continue to do.
Right now we're pushing to get phase three of the construction plan in place by this summer, which is to bring the layout from the current end of track at Winnipauk and extend it around the back walls of the basement to the staging area behind Branchville. From there we will be attaching a new 'Mole' staging area behind Branchville to run trains in and out of, allowing us to operate the layout from here to Wilson Point while we continue building the layout towards Danbury and beyond.
More than a few of you have been asking when I'm going to update the layout design pages with plans of the upper level. Back in April 2004 I posted the lower level plan, but as we got to working on the layout a lot I got distracted from finishing up that project. I'm pleased to say that I've just recently updated the layout design page with a new diagram of the upper level, and in the coming days and weeks I hope to put through more page updates on all of the individual towns. I've added some pictures of the layout under construction to the Wilson Point, South Norwalk and Winnepauk pages recently to show some of the work that's gone on there, and what it is looking like. I hope to add more photos soon as we get the scenery started in more spots along the line.
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Please be sure to search through the links at the left. There are many article I have written on a number of subjects, I hope you will find them interesting. The newest article I've just completed is a review of a new software product out there called Model Builder Software. I hope you'll read it before buying it. Another popular article I think you'll enjoy are Operations 101 - Surviving Your First Operating Session. One of my many interests is in model railroad layout design, and there are several articles here you may find useful on that subject. By far the most popular is The Ten Commandments of Yard Design, which explains how to design a model railroad freight yard that will operate efficiently. Another I'm excited about is the idea of using fabricated Wood I-Beams for supporting your layout, and I've written instructions of how to make your own at reasonable prices. Be sure to check out other works on Passenger Train Operations a discussion of Staging options.
And if you are into modeling, you must check out the web articles on building and casting your own freight cars. I've just started a new project where I'm trying to kitbash a 1900 Baldwin 4-6-0 into a 1880's Rogers Ten-Wheeler -- This should be fun. The Coal Gondola project and Caboose Projects are both completed, I hope you'll find them interesting. This Molding and casting technique is something any modeler can use to compound his precious time, as the savvy reader will see. Instead of spending a lot of time making individual parts, the modeler can make one really good part, and then pull as many copies of it as he needs! Everyone should try casting something, it is great fun!
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