So I ended my last entry with rhetorical questions.."so what did it all lead to? where am I in the hobby now??? "

I suspect there's no single easy answer but I'll put it in a nutshell...it led me to the idea that there is no set answer...nothing is set in concrete, everything is open to discovery and experiment..it's a hobby and that means it is fun so lose the fun and it's not worth doing.

I became fascinated with the ideas expounded on Carl Arendts' site and in Model Trains International, to whit...small is beautiful and the concept of multi-modeing era and/or location on the same layout.So I decided to keep my next layout on the smallish size, 6ft. x 2 ft, a couple of pics of it are in the precedeing blog entry ....no more empire building for me.

Now a bit of explanation on my view of layout size and this isn't a comment or judgement on others druthers, just my own wants and druthers. As I said, my last layout was 6ft. x 2ft. and that is as big as I'll go for the foreseeable future. I'm experimenting with makeing layouts as light and portable as possible so one person can easily carry by hand and set-up quickly and easily and yet still be strong and durable enough to exhibit.

I tried using foamcore for the baseboard of my next layout, its been done before but I didn't succeed very well and gave up on that idea. My next attempt I decided on balsa wood...nice and light, strong if built properly and I felt it would be stable enough if sealed properly. Here's a pic of the balsa board,its been sealed and painted green and hinged in the middle with the track pinned and wired...it's 6ftx1ft unfolded so it fits easily on the backseat of my car when its folded up.

The trackplan is very simple and I had quite a bit of help with it from Shortliner Jack Trollope....I also wanted to use this layout to test DCC...so I wired it for both DCC and regularDC power....I also took the opportunity to try the manual wire-in-tube type of point control albeit modified to another suggestion of Shortliners, bike spoke and choc-blocks, here is a pic of Shortliners drawing of it..thanks Jack! :icon_biggrin:

Now,due to my bad eyesight I stick to 00 and HO modelling and as I stated earlier I am interested in German,UK and Canadian outline so I decided to try to do this layout in a multi-mode concept. Let me explain my view on this concept...simply put it just means that scenery,buildings,signage etc., is either generic enough that it can fit into any of the 3 countries or various eras, or failing that, the building(s) and/or signage can easily be changed to accomodate a change of country or era. Of course it's a purists or rivet-counters nightmare but it works for me.