First post

As I was designing and doing initial construction of my model railroad, I decided I needed to store key design parameters I have chosen and other minutiae along the way: which gauge wire am I using, exactly which color for the fascia paint so I order more, etc. I could store this somewhere on my computer, but by putting it on a blog, it's in a more stable location, other people may learn from my mistakes, I can easily store other info like images, and so forth. Thus, this blog. Note that I am writing this mostly selfishly -- I am not trying to build a reader base, nor am I particularly eager to get deeply involved in lots of conversations with readers. I have limited hobby time and would like to put it into the trains. That said, please do feel free to point out problems, make suggestions, or post other comments or questions.

A bit about my railroad and philosophy:
I've always liked the Boston & Maine RR (B&M), a class I railroad based in New England. I grew up in a suburb of Boston and always liked the New England environment: rocky coastlines, forested mountains, small farms, rock walls, covered bridges, etc. I've lived and railfanned other places: along UP's line by Sacramento out to Donner Pass, trains in the Mojave, Alaska Railroad, Norfolk Southern's lines in the Southeast US, but I still like the B&M. Thus, that's my prototype.

As far as scale, my father has always modeled in HO, and I could borrow some equipment from him, but I decided to go with N scale. It is small and so can fit in the spaces I've had available to me. I could go to Z, but that doesn't have the manufacturing support (fewer and more expensive models) and doesn't seem to support switching as readily as N does.

I thought for some time of building an NTrak module, and there are various arguments for and against this, but it basically comes down to the fact I am not particularly a people person, and interacting with others at a train show is not what I want to do in my free time. So, I'm basically building a shelf layout in my garage, instead.