Friends and Progress

A couple of my operations group friends have stopped by to help in the rebuild.

A couple of gag photos for Gene since he is known as the Reach Police on one of the forums for always counseling layout builders to minimize the layout width to be able to easily collect the derailed trains. We built an access hatch in the loop especially for him.

Later Bob came by to tune up some of the complicated trackwork before it gets partially buryed by a higher-level track.

Meanwhile I have added some LED lighting under the shelving to make it easier to ID cars in the staging yards. The shelf itself contains my collection of Lionel TT gauge (1:120) static trains. 

A recent Railwire forum thread was started on the equipment in the early days of n scale. Here is my early “spreadsheet” of purchases beginning in 1968.

And some of the early equipment? (Ah the memories!)

1968 Atlas hopper cars (224x series)

First car is an Aurora (Postage Stamp Trains) box car, the rest are 1968 Atlas box cars

The last picture shows the Atlas 1968 cars that are still used on my layout today. (I used PC cars as transition, Rapido to KD coupler, cars. (Penn Central was way beyond my modeling era.)

The PC and Vermont cars were built from Atlas box car kits. You could save 21 cents that way! ($1.29 vs. $1.50 for a RTR car)