Jay keeps telling me that this train layout he’s working on is going to be a 10 year project. I suppose that’s true because it feels like we haven’t been getting anywhere with it lately.

I know that he has to work out exactly where the track is going to run so that we can then work around that.

He has built the incline around the far end of the layout so I guess that’s an improvement. My part of this is the ‘finishing’ and detail components. Since we aren’t quite there yet I’ve been trying to do a lot of planning in my head. That’s not an easy task because things are so easily misplaced up there!

Jay has begun to glue down the track so we can now start to get a better feel for where the structures and details will go. We started laying out roads and trying to determine how to do things that make sense and look good.

I keep reminding Jay of elements that I want to add into the scenery, like my church. I guess this is where we will put the church and the church yard. In my head I see a simple white church with a steeple… similar to what was in my town where I grew up. I wanted to put the church closer to town, but Jay says that it will be fine out here on the edge.

Then we have the corner of Industry. We will have one of the roads going underneath the underpass so that the employees who live out on that side of the county won’t have to drive all the way around the town.

Then we will have the ultra-light airstrip. Jay measured it out and we will have enough room to make a scale airstrip for an ultra-light plane.

This is an ultra-light aircraft. Jay is going to be disappointed that I can’t recall which one this is, but I’m a girl so what does he expect? This is one of the three that he has actually built and is similar to what he will miniaturize for the train layout.

Then we have the farm area. The farmer will be able to use part of the air strip property for haying (he’s friends with the guy who owns the property) and the pasture for the herd of beef cows will be on the other side of the tracks. That means I’ll have to figure out how to create an underpass for the cattle to easily travel between the barn and the pasture, but I’m up for a challenge.

I think that we have the roads mostly figured out. In the meantime I’m still trying to work on the buildings that we already have in progress. On these hot and humid summer days it’s nice to spend time in the cool basement.

This past weekend I decided to concentrate on the hotel building. Except, due to the fact that we are modeling a small rural town I didn’t feel that an extravagant hotel really made sense. So I’ve decided that it’s actually an apartment building with shops on the bottom floor. It looks very similar to an apartment building in the small town where I grew up.

What do you think? I still have more to paint on here, but you have no idea how hard it is to paint with a three-bristle brush and not make a mess.

Once the outside painting is done I then have to partition the inside so that we can wire it for lights and you can see the segmented rooms from the outside. There’s more work to these things than I realized!