Ok folks, so now that I'm getting a handle on this new site and this blog stuff I'll try to be a bit more informative about myself and my railroading interests... and add some more pics since each one is worth a thousand words :icon_mrgreen:

About 8 years ago,due to a medical issue I had to give up my first love, scuba-diving, and my scuba business. As such I found I had quite a bit of spare time on my hands and, for various reasons which I won't bore you with, but they include christmas trees and trains, I took up the hobby of model railroading. So, using magazines and the internet I started informing myself about the hobby and so was introduced to both UK 00 outline and German HO outline, especially early 20th century companies.

Now I am Canadian, but of a contrary sort of character and so of course I chose to completely ignore North American outline and started accumulating both UK and German stock and commenced construction of the proverbial railroad empire. Well, that didn't last too long as I figured out fairly quickly that I'd either get very bored or very frustrated before it was ever finished. Fortunately for me I stumbled on a website and a magazine, and their members and contributors, that changed my whole perspective on model railroading. Those two sites are Carl Arendts' Micro/Small Layouts site http://www.carendt.us/ and Chris Ellis' magazine Model Trains International http://www.modeltrainsinternational.co.uk/ and its discussion forum http://forum.mtimag.co.uk/index.php

So what was it about these sites and magazine that changed things for me?? Well first of all and most importantly they introduced me to some of the nicest and most helpful people around, such as Jack Shortliner Trollop, John Flann, Chris Gilbert, Mog, Blackcloud, the late Dave Howell and many many more ... and all these people, both named and unamed showed me that smaller can be better :icon_thumbsup2: AND the concept of multi-modeing both era and location on the same layout. Of course these concepts led to a snowball effect of learning for me which kept up my interest in the hobby...so what did it all lead to? where am I in the hobby now??? I think I'll leave that to the next entry :icon_clap: So here are a few pics of my first attempt at a small ,multi-mode layout..its about 8 years ago