ROUNDTABLE - What’s harder Prototypical or Freelance model railroading?

[Music] thank you [Music] [Music] foreign [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] thank you [Music] [Music] good evening model railroaders and welcome back to the second section podcast where it's regular guys talking about model railroading I'm your host Andy Dorsch and joining me tonight is my co-host Mike Ostertag Mike how are you doing fan flippantastic I've been waiting for a while this one this is gonna be good everybody better buckle up because this is going to be a fun one this is this is gonna be a really awesome show it is freelance week here on the second section podcast and tonight we have a panel of freelance model railroaders here to talk with us about some things they're going to introduce their themselves uh the their model railroad and then Mike and I have put up a I guess a grueling Gauntlet of trying questions about freelance model railroading that these guys are going to have to answer and then we're also going to be taking questions from the section crew out there tonight and Humanity Junction Heath we'll just take one right now he says yep next week are we going to discuss which is better digitrax or nce you know what no we don't Bloodshed on the podcast we don't talk about religion on the podcast there you go and then uh there's the last topic that we do want to talk about tonight is we are going to be of giving away a home shops tangent PS2 fifth 47.50 covered Hopper here HO scale we're going to be giving that away tonight in celebration of freelance week here on the second section and it's for Michigan Interstate that's a Jim Dandy of a car all the way this delivery Channel's got nothing on us with shark week this is going to make Shark Week look like a fishbowl yeah okay but Guppies so tonight on on the podcast of course we have Mike and we're gonna go around the horn this evening our panelists will introduce themselves we have Chris shicker that says SS hi everybody um so Chris how are you doing this evening excited I am doing outstanding excellent and um what what skill do you modeling Hey Joe h0 okay and then do you have a a freelancer Proto freelance layout I have a Proto freelancer Illinois Midland uh yeah and the layout is based in Decatur Illinois okay and then how long have you been modeling before uh 1976 my birthday I got my first ho Taiko train set okay wow so you've been doing this for a few years yeah okay um let's go right over to our other Chris on the panel this evening Chris Bell how are you doing why don't you introduce yourself to the section crew all right um so I'm Chris Bell I'm an in-score from Eastern Iowa and uh what all did we talk about I I'm sorry I was kind of no that's all right so um so you're an N scaler um what's uh what do you have a layout currently or a free app freelance layout uh so technically I've got bench work so I have the PFE the plywood forever why would forever that's a good one that's a good one right I only say that because I've got oh where'd she go uh this all right you can't really see it but uh TFE oh Alco that led to my freelancing um okay yeah so so yeah and uh you know listening to you guys I've come up with some different ideas on terms but uh so yeah I've been around since 1991 in in scale and uh so yeah it's a it's a work in progress right now um just built the bench work and uh tore down I had a 30 by 60 uh layout that I was running as was my freelance that's a monster that's not 30 inches by 60 inches you know yeah I'm good yeah I didn't know what I was signing up for when I said yes to to Andy I gotta admit so that's good though I mean that's you know kick the tires and and or actually kick the kick the wheels and uh see how see how it goes this season so welcome Chris thank you yeah and then we have Clark kooning Clark I'm here how are you how are you I'm great thank you very much and I appreciate your invitation clerk um for those who don't you are here in the second section um why don't you just kind of give a brief introduction of who you are what scale you model in and then if you have a layout currently what is it yeah I thank you um I'm a rubber Gauger I have everything from Z scale to uh on3 oh my gosh I have to say I I'm a big Narrow Gauge fan which you know okay um but uh I uh Chris I probably have uh 60 N scale uh DCC units and probably about 600 cars so I'm quite happy to come and run with you uh I have uh I have lots of t-track uh uh modules um because they're like waste potato chips you can't just build one I had a big N scale when I was younger I probably really got serious when I was about 12 but I've had a you know Lionel said since I've been five and uh I had a big sn3 layouts um that unfortunately got had to be torn down um because of a divorce and uh then went through a little bit of a change in my life and then I was out luckily enough to retire and moved uh way up north in uh Northern Ontario I live on top of Lake Huron and all the guys here in this little Community are eight show guys so I said okay I'll start it some HL stuff there you go drink the Kool-Aid yeah so I have a layout that's roughly NHO um 13 by about 30. with a section in the hallway and um later on I can show some some little bit of pictures and stuff so outstanding standing very good Clark welcome to the show um being very modest by the way I believe um you're a master Model Railroader as well if that if I'm not mistaken I am thank you very much yeah yeah and I'm an old guy in MMR terms uh my number is like 225 so yeah so big big nmra guy and um Master Model Railroader so look forward to catching your insights this evening that's for sure well thank you and then last but certainly not least we have Matt forcum here with us Matt how you doing doing good how are you guys doing good so um same song and dance here for the section crew out there this evening why don't you introduce yourself and uh and what are you doing out there in the world of model railroading well my name is uh Matt forkum I've been modeling uh I'm 43 now and I've been doing it since I was probably in Junior High um I've had four or five layouts over the years I'm currently working on what I hope to be my last layout I just got done with the wiring on this one and I I'm like I'm at that point where I I never want to solder another piece of wired another piece of track ever again so um my layout is uh a 14 by 20 foot uh freelance model bear road um that's awesome and this is the second or third iteration of this layout depending on on how you count it so okay great to be here yeah and and I was uh rude to to SS earlier here um and you Chris you have Chris schicker you have a Facebook presence as well don't you for your for your model railroad correct did I did I lose your oh sound there Chris was that mute yup that's all right hey that's that's good now see we're starting to come back everything got all sorted out now we're starting to kind of somebody's gonna be first thank you Chris for doing that I mean I I was really starting to sweat it here this is I'll fall on the sword yeah there we go yeah so we got the Illinois Midland here um let's see this is your your Facebook group ooh promo for the the podcast that's good um yeah is this a group or a page uh um it's a private group spam out keep the spammers out there you go but yeah you do a nice job uh displaying your modeling and um some of the stuff that's that's going on here um with what you're doing had to put the Proto throttle down after a couple minutes some coverage here of the RPM it looks like yeah I did buy three Squealers so when I was there from Iowa engineering but uh yeah I had to put the Proto Throttle Down yeah it looks like oh we have Matt here as well so good stuff yeah Matt and I met at the RPM meet he he's been he's been on my my page for a bit now and then we know a uh Isaac uh yeah Isaac Isaac actually designed my layout really and uh Matt did he design yours too no no I ended up doing that I I didn't meet him till recently so yeah before that I mean I've had an online presence with him but that's the first face-to-face meeting we had was at St Louis last week yeah that's fantastic yeah um yeah so make sure to ask uh Chris for admission if you want to check out his modeling exploits and Matt yeah just answer the questions just answer the there's three easy questions answer those and it's a lot easier to get in yeah then then he doesn't have to stalk you online that's no fun right and Matt you you're out there in the world of uh social media as well with your model railroad if I'm not mistaken correct yes yeah I have a Facebook page as well it is public so you know spammers come on in I don't care I had your own Peril right uh and uh yeah I'm also I also have a YouTube channel and uh an Instagram account as well hey just remember all those spam hits add to the algorithm so that's right all right I want yeah I want like an awesome t-shirt whatever I can get yeah speaking of the Squealer you had a great video on that um demonstrating um you know the the installation and functionality of it that's really cool yeah thank you and then yeah those guys from is Iowa skill engineering are gonna have a hard time topping that they're gonna their next thing is gonna be pretty uh it's gonna have to be pretty ridiculous I think that Squealer is pretty cool I picked up three of them myself yeah it's gonna once you put the Thai grown in and everything like that it's gonna be really awesome yeah yeah so Matt do you have a pretty awesome uh YouTube channel and then you're out on the on the gram as the young kids call it is that right well I don't know I don't know if they call it that or not I am on Instagram that's uh for me I think uh it's quick and easy for me to take a picture of you know a recent purchase or you know something I'm I'm frustrated over and throw it up on Instagram so um yeah you can find me out there as well outstanding yeah good and and like again I've been following Matt's YouTube channel now for a few years and um it's very high quality uh produced videos very informative and entertaining too I'll never forget when you hammered those hot wings and uh that's that was one of my favorite episodes that she had up so um but yeah so welcome to the welcome to the podcast uh looking forward to uh your uh takes on on freelance modeling as well and um we'll we'll kick it over to the section crew tonight we have a few people in here looks like we're up to almost 120. um so welcome everybody in the section crew following us along this evening um couple news and notes for y'all keep it uh civil and and PC we don't want to be fighting here in in the chat we do have moderators out there they're the folks with the little blue wrenches next to their names I've given them the full authority to give you the Stanky Boot and uh export you out of the the chat so um follow the rules have some fun and ask some questions um for our our uh expert panel this evening so um yeah Otter Creek and Rio Grande says only 52 likes hmm if you guys want to hit the like button subscribe if you haven't subscribed to the channel already really helps us out so tonight if you're watching hit the like button it should be 120 likes 120 likes that's right it should be a it should be 120. uh 119 there's one troll one troll there's always one there's always one there's always one yeah all right good stuff good stuff okay um so again let's uh let's go ahead and start off with the layout introductions um so Chris or SS um you guys call me Chris Chris okay how to do this I'm awkward I'm just really awkward um you've put together a lovely little video for us this evening yeah I was yeah it's my first attempt and it was it was pretty good um so we're gonna play that and then there's gonna be a whole uh slew of questions to follow okay I'm sure and um so we'll we'll cue up the the greasy meat hands band here um this is a little out of their element but uh should be good um so let's uh let's take a look at the video Chris has put together on his freelance model railroad foreign thank you that was very interesting to say the least Chris um first of all my first question is is I didn't know the greasy meat hands bands were classically trained yes so there's G major yeah yeah oh so we spare no expense here at the second section podcast when it comes with production quality and the quality of our musicians that we have on on staff um yeah it was it was good but there's a lot I have so many questions yeah there's a lot to there's a lot to unpack there so okay so the let's let's start with the the name of the railroad uh for those who are just joined the show we're up to 130 now um by the way so why don't you take us through that um and and let's talk about uh the scale the size and then we'll get into [Music] um uh some of the some of the pictures and and the map of where where your layout's located okay well the the I started that Concept in high school in the uh okay in the 80s um I was you know I think it was the only thing I did to Rebel was like where I grew up in Western New York everybody did New York Central Pennsylvania appellations or Santa Fe and I'm like yeah okay let's be different um and then going through Mr and I you know I I had in 1982. hold on hold on let me get you up there on the big screen yeah yeah there you go 1982. you know I saw this at the public library raise it up just a bit where we go and I got I saw this for the first time yeah the vnl Alan mcclellan's Virginia and Ohio and I'm like reading this article as a 14 year old and I'm like that's cool you know it looked real and then just I think at that time Mr was Model Railroader was doing a lot more Midwest in their coverage and they did the uh the Model Railroad Club in Chicago and Batavia you know the model Midwest Model Railroad club and I saw that and you know everything was only you know this wide you know oh sure and you know I'm like that's easy you know that's not a lot of scenery you could probably put something up really quick instead of doing huge mountains and I developed you know the Illinois Midland and I just got a the atlas the railroad Alice in 1948 and I just started looking at railroad lines and you know there's a lot of Illinois Central lines in the middle of the state that eventually were getting sold off and abandoned I got a couple IC books for Christmas and it just took off from there and um then I saw the thing about the Decatur and uh in Decatur in the early 90s Illinois Central moved 600 Freight cars a day oh and they don't their yard is only six tracks wide you know their main yard at Grand Avenue and it was just like wow you know six tracks wide that's not big and like you know they used you know end-to-end switchers and it's just like you know it's just snowballed it was something different and I actually never visited Decatur until 1996. you know in my late 20s and I just you know but I just did it from books and what I could see in the magazines you know like the Chicago Illinois Midland um I remember reading in Ralph in a railroad in the late 80s yeah that the the utility in Chicago sold the railroad to a company called Illinois's Midland Industries and I'm like looks like my company just bought a railroad and I just Incorporated that into my Railroad and then with the the Chicago Missouri and Western that failure I took part part of that into my group I took over the nickel plate from Ramsey Illinois west of St Louis and I had the connection I got the SP as you know trackers rights you know to get some more money on the line and you know that's the railroad so yeah so and I you know I stopped in 1995 because I'm not a big fan of graffiti and um the spup merger kind of you know kind of derails my Railroad and then also the Canadian national buying Illinois Central kind of you know in 99 that kind of puts a monkey wrench in my railroad so I stop at 95. hmm so so you stop at 95 let me ask you this again I'm sorry to discuss religion here on the show but are you uh ditch lights or beacons um do you prefer yes okay on that transition on that trans I'm that transition guys before we let him on what's that why haven't we screened these guys but we did we had a pre-show meeting they all checked out he never brought that up that was never asked that was never brought up so it sounds like uh so so the backstory so backstory is very key for a freelance railroad right um so yours is essentially this I guess amoeba in Central Illinois starting to grab different Define right railroads as as time goes on if that's yeah if I'm not mistaken and the on the Facebook page the railroad was started by former Illinois Terminal in Illinois Central management that was let go because of the downsizing in Norfolk and Western bought the I.T um so they want to create a railroad you know and they're like they bought the former IC lines you know mostly south of Bloomington North of Decatur that was the first ones that go up for sale because they wanted to provide the elevators for service and they just saw the opportunity and they just you know they bought used equipment I mean all my equipment's used none of it's brand new um so is your layout or is the railroad based on it's obviously it must be based on prototypical a prototypical um map right yeah right yeah it's all it's all real railroad that one time in you know in the last 100 years or so okay so so what with your railroad being what it is what in today's railroad what doesn't exist because of the Illinois Midland hmm oh uh what doesn't exist the let's see like you said you have the Wabash line going into the from what is it Decatur to St Louis no you were saying no no no um I use a little NS for trackers rights to Springfield to get to the Chicago and Illinois Midland um but I use the Illinois Central Charter line all the way down to Ramsey Illinois which is where it it oh okay where I made a connection to the former Nickel Plate Cloverleaf um that NS gate that's you know sold to us you know and so I so we could get to St Louis and to make keep money on the line SP never bought the line from Chicago to St Louis they run on my Railroad um to get to St Louis so we we've got a couple of questions here um so we're gonna Heath we see you um with the definition of freelance model railroading we're going to get to that in a second Tom Holly's got a really cool question here um for for you Chris any old icg gp10s for power um well I have a former icg that was former Illinois Midland that was sold to the cater Junction now the Decatur Junction in real life runs from Assumption Illinois into Decatur because it Services a co-op an assumption well they also used to run from North East out of uh Decatur to uh White Earth that line in there um so that's the only portion they still use under my my railroad so I gave them one of my former g10s it's red it's orange and white it's going to be ghost lettered painted over but they're logo for my logo yeah it's gonna be it's and then I want to give them an Elko too so I don't haven't decided alcohol to give them yet yeah so but yeah um so that they're gonna have a little little run in once in a while my problem with my layout is I just don't have room for staging unfortunately so I'm kind of limited in like what trains I can bring in and out but during an operating session what's uh what's the um what's the footprint uh it's a down here in in South Carolina my layout is in actually the second floor because we don't have basements here uh they'd be full of water if we did uh so it's on the second floor and it's they call it the Loft it's like a free space you come up the stairs you turn a corner and there's this big open space and that is where the layout is and it's like 14 by 15 ish okay so that's that's not bad at all so I wanna I think what we're gonna do I see the show is gonna flow in a certain direction this evening so we're gonna go through and describe each other's layouts but I think I want the panel to take questions from the audience here uh while we go and do our our layout uh updates because there's way too many awesome questions coming in and I don't want to ignore those so um first things first here um I think Heath from Humanity Junction had a very good question that I want the panel to take a crack at um and we can all have the different answer and we can all have the wrong answer the right answer it's okay what is the definition of freelance model railroading so you know what I'm gonna let's let's kick that off with the MMR I was just gonna say that let's let's have let's have Clark let's have a Clark take a stab at it yeah let's have Clark do that he's been around for a day or so you're on mute Clark make sure yeah yeah I I was I was like thank you very much um um actually I kind of wrote some stuff years ago and it's in my presentation do you want me to maybe do that now um um we're gonna let's hold off on the presentation just okay just a second because there's a whole thing in there about about what yeah exactly that question so yeah one of the I'm going to turn it around a little bit if I may there was a really good uh question about what's the difference between freelance and Proto Lance and I thought that was kind of a neat um twist and I I now that I think of that um I think I'm more of a proto-lance guy but um that's that was a neat that was a neat thought and uh yeah so there is no there is no real wrong answer to to the definition right I mean it it's all objective in what the modeler is actually trying to um uh uh what's the word I'm looking um what's the word I'm looking for what the modeler is trying to uh create replica yeah I think to a degree all of us are proto-freelancers because it's almost impossible to model all but the shortest railroads and I think if you look at it that way we're all kind of in that in that proto-freelance group um and I kind of think and and in my presentation I'm kind of cheating on it I'm looking at it now I think there's three three different um categories uh one is a layout that draws heavily from one or more prototypes to give the impression or convey the impression of Herrera Road and it may not necessarily copy all the details of a specific layout um the other one is maybe models one or more specific rear railroads and using the what if scenario what happens if so and so was bought or you know and it became that and what happens if the powers to be had done things differently than they had done what if the Milwaukee Road never left the Pacific extension and stayed a class one all the way to the West Coast that's a real thing guys model that you know and then there is the fictional railroad that follows inform and function of a design and operates to the to a type of railroad in that era or region uh of which the layout has said it so you know it doesn't I there's that's the neat thing about model railroading and the um imagination of of the hobbyist hmm that I pass I think well I think I think I think he hit the nail on the head with that first statement is the fact that we're all part of kind of a Proto freelance type of thing because we all wanted our power to be perfect we all want the boxcars to be perfect but then we will sure as heck skip on what we do with the layout in order to compress what we need to in order to get you know selective compression is the biggest hot is the hobby is the biggest in uh enemy but it is also a necessary evil you know what I'm saying so it's it's just you're right you know in that respect that makes even the most vehement prototype modeler is still freelancing to a degree because of because of selective compression and things of that nature you know it's you know unless you're modeling you know like you said a a railroad that's two miles long I mean even that's a hundred and was it about 120 feet you would need 120 feet worth of run and get two full-scale HO scale miles in is there something like 60 feet so so I mean it's I think you hit the nail on the head with that I don't know what everybody else thinks but well I had like I had a hard time justifying having my Railroad switch Decatur um because it you know the ICU is making money 600 cars a day in and out of the yard they're making money it's like how does how do I justify my railroad doing that and you know back in 89 90 the IC you know they cut they cut the double main line going from Chicago down to Memphis down to one track uh Moyer the president Moyer did that so my thing was who worked for Moyer Hunter Harrison yeah so hey what Hunter came up with an idea of let's save some money in Decatur by doing the contract switching so that's how I got my my Decatur my Illinois Midland to do the switching indicator I see he's still there they're bringing the trains in but Chris you just don't know it that you know Canadian Railways are taking over the world one railroad at a time that's why I stopped at 99. they're doing that politely said there I I wanna I wanna jump on what Randy Timmerman said there okay I'll tell Luke himself Luke knows how I feel about his layout I'll tell Luke himself and if you actually stop and look at Luke lemon's layout as Sue second sub it's a gorgeous layout the basic premise behind it he has the the basics are all there in Form and Function it looks just like it does on on the real prototype however he still has things that he had to severely compress like like between between the North End of Winnebago or excuse me the uh the yeah the North Winnebago and Oshkosh or South Winnebago and Oshkosh that's only a five or six foot or eight foot section and he's got four miles three miles compressed in into eight feet yeah so that's where we're coming from he's got the he's got all the aspects there but it's all smushed into one into one spot and even he'll tell you well I had to kind of fudge a little bit here I had to do this a little bit you know I had to get this in here but but so I had to flip this around it actually should be on the other side you know but and he doesn't have very many places that are like that but there are you know so I like uh What uh your naked Force said he says Thomas the Tank Engine except it's based in Chicago and the locomotives running gangs yeah right oh man um so I guess uh it started offline Andy yeah it's all right it was good um so so to bring it back though so and I think there was a neat follow-up that Heath and Heath's pretty much just moderating the the show for us at this point um but he he talks here what's what's the follow-on question he says if uh freelance is based on a prototype then what's the difference uh between freelance and Proto lands right so one of the things that we kind of talk about with our freelance railroads is we have some sort of anchor back to a real railroad of some point um so I see um Chris Bell and Matt you guys are kind of shaking your heads um do you do you guys what is your take on that in terms of I guess the definition of freelance and then you know having that that anchor back to the Prototype some way somehow yeah sure I um I I was always drawn to freelance because of sort of the creativity the artistic Freedom that you have I'm not feeling like you were anchored to specifically what somebody else had decided you know 15 20 years ago and how things were going to run or whatever and so that's what always made me really interested in freelance if I'm being honest though another reason why I've always been really into freelance has been because I I don't know a lot about a certain prototype you know especially back in the day before the internet finding information about anything was really kind of difficult especially if you're you know younger guy like I was um you know you can't just pick up and go down you know spend a weekend down uh beside a track somewhere in South Carolina or wherever you know I can real Fanning your favorite maybe maybe Chris can but I can't I can't go to Decatur that's 800 miles away yeah um and so but now as I get older um and I I did pick for my freelance model rare but I did pick a prototype to kind of Base everything off of uh and as I researched the prototype for my freelance efforts I find more and more that prototype kind of seeping in because I'm falling more and more in love with how they how they solved a lot of the problems on you know on the Prototype and I'm wanting to solve those problems on my freelance efforts so what started as just a big freelance Venture for me has slowly become more and more prototypical as I've refined uh you know my idea of a freelance railroad over the years and this is this is like the second or third iteration of of my freelance Railroad and with every iteration it's getting more and more prototypical as I go Matt do you think that stems from your track plan or you're in in the essence of trying to get to the operation because I think a lot of people when they start you know they want the spaghetti Bowl principle and then they realize hey that's not why am I making these moves yeah you know and you kind of not only when you're doing operations but then you think well a railroad isn't going to make all these moves because they don't want to be paying for people right uh like Mike to sit and eat bon bons and or Tom Hawley yeah uh so I I you know and so does that interation or that idea of your change does that come from your track plan or your operations or kind of combination to to make it more it's still freelance but it's got to become prototypical yeah I I think yeah I think as I've gotten more room over the years I started you know with the four bay foot sheet and then I went even smaller to an N-Scale lad on a door and then I got a little bit bigger with a switching layout in a basement now I've got a whole room that I can dedicate you know as I get more and more space there's there's a greater opportunity for me to model what what was what it was actually like there's just more space to put in the track that you need in order to make that happen and to do it in a realistic manner um and so with that hey availability comes the desire to go okay well you know now that I now that I can kind of do this what should I do you know um how much of the real railroad can I bring into my basement uh and still yeah my needs uh from a from an artist's standpoint well with doing that how much okay let's see here which way do I want to go okay so by doing that over the course of time have you continually added more stuff or has negative space started to venture into it so that you have the same areas you've just lengthened the Run between them to give more of a prototypical feel because you know it's the old adage you know you don't want your caboose in one town and your engines in another right yeah yeah you know that and and so it it in the you know length of run has always been one phrase used negative space is another phrase that's sometimes used to to describe that so are you finding more freelance opportunities through the Prototype to create that negative space so that your freelance Railroad becomes more prototypical yeah uh for me I I definitely am a less is more kind of person when it comes to track work and that kind of thing so I don't I'm not a spaghetti cabal kind of guy um so definitely Spain will spread things out a longer run between towns the last version of the spare world was basically just one town and then staging was the rest of the world and I didn't really understand necessarily what was going on in the rest of the world I knew there were trains out there somewhere that would bring cars and then they would end up in my staging and then I would just bring them around and switch my little my little town that I had but now that I have a lot more space quite a bit more space all I've really done was add one more town I I just taken that stage in and essentially just well I mean essentially I've just added scenery to the staging you know and then it stretched it out and give myself a little bit of run between between staging between what that was into you know the old version of this little town I had which I've just expanded out a little bit more just to give myself a little more space so that I can model things a little more realistically so um and the the the the fun was just figuring out what what's what's happened over there in that area that used to be just you know the Ethereal plane of staging what's really going on there and and finding that out and learning about that you know I'm I'm growing as a as a modeler I'm growing as somebody who's getting more and more into operations and and getting more prototypical as I go so Chris Bell so you're you're up let's let's hear Holly what what do you what do you think about yeah it does yeah I mean talk about rabbit holes uh so you know is it in my modeling the U.P on some fictitious XYZ Branch or uh you know so what is freelance or is it more fictional uh and I I was looking back back at uh something I wrote back in 99 1997 it was proto-fictional so Proto freelance wasn't even a thing so um that was the term back then uh freelance it's it's you know uh and we're all Freelancers in like uh Clark was saying in some degree I mean you've got a freelance some element of it uh so I think it's that concept of to me freelance freelance is making the whole thing you know like um what Matt did he's got a whole railroad from scratch you know and then the next step up is is what Chris did with the Illinois Midland something real but incorporating that that fictional into it so yeah it's it's a tricky tricky kind of question to answer and I I think Clark did a good job with it and I mean what more can you say than that and see and see I come from a different perspective because I have the unique um I have the the luxury I guess I should say of being able to go from the inside looking out and and Luke lemons and I talk about this all the time and it's uh just one of those things where um where you know you you have the inside looking out aspect but yet uh that can only okay because of what I do for a living I'm able to see things typically most modelers aren't able to see on a day-to-day basis on a regular basis I can see things I see the why long before somebody that is driving past in their car and has never worked for a railroad ever will see why something is done I see that from the minute I walk into the room or into the building I know what's going on and I know why it's happening so a good a good example is it like in Manitowoc we have a hundred storage cars sitting there they're in the yard they're storage cars I get asked all the time why uh why are why are the storage cars why are those box cars there what's going on something must be happening in man talk no they're just being stored they're that's why they're just there they're they're Michael those company cars no they're just I don't know where they came from I have absolutely no idea they're all not Canadian national they're just no there are they're they're all F box cars and and they're single door F boxes and what we were told is there's a hundred of them coming put them somewhere okay you know that's that's that's what we did and and come to find out it's because of some paper mill that um is some paper mill someplace somewhere in the country or you know had an issue and they these were their lease cars and they're sitting there allegedly until the lease Runs Out they could be there for three more weeks they could be there for another eight years we don't know how long they're gonna be there uh all we were told is that you have a hundred of them once you get to 100 we're not going to give you any more and that's gonna be the end of it right well and so so many short lines they advertise we've got room for x amount of cars I mean your short line of the show uh you've mentioned that a couple times so yeah yeah some of those railroads have more cars than their actual actual trackids can handle if they were all to be sent back to them at one time their railroads wouldn't be able to handle all the freight cars which is an interesting part about this whole conversation because of the fact that that's something we don't think about right we we always think about and that on my Farland terminal that's something I I've come up with a back story for that um with my Freight cars and and I'll explain that when I go through and do my presentation and stuff but it's it's one of those situations where uh you know looking at freelancing things like storage if you're modeling a date a a railroad in today's society that's an industry that storing cars in the middle of absolute nowhere is an industry that's a lot of railroads make money I I believe the Escanaba and Lake Superior up north of Green Bay here they make three dollars a day per car you know if you stop and think about it you have a thousand cars on your lit on your Railroad that's a lot of money coming in and when you've only got a handful of Industries you know that's uh that could be a good way to uh like maintain revenue and keep keep the wheels turning you know that's uh back in the year box cars you know it's interesting you were saying about that because uh Tom Hawley and I were talking earlier and he was saying you know and then when they want if they need a specific car to come out there's a big fee to move that get that pulled out well because it could take four or five days yeah yeah I know I know when the Els goes and moves cars they do them and I believe in there are certain blocks that they'll have they have they make them when they want to move they move them blocks but if they want a specific set they've only got so much Mainline space and it might take them two days they might have to shut down their Railroad in order to dig out these 10 cars for a customer and then they got to put everything back and it's just the fact of life it's just a reality of the way the the the whole situation is set up but nobody models that because oh yeah I do well well we do we have tons of models up in our closets that we haven't pulled out yet right yeah okay well so so that way we model it right but but I mean as far as like with the freelance aspect that's not something that because it's not sexy right we don't we don't go and say well I'm going to Model A 20-mile Railroad and I'm going to have one little paper mill on it and the rest of it is going to be storage cars and those cars are going to sit there but nobody's gonna go and do that I mean there it's just not the way the hobby is cured so to speak and it's a lot of money to have sitting there doing nothing you know um but so Cece right see Chris yeah Illinois Midland Chris all right so so with your layout yeah with your layout the way it is okay and then you're mapped the way it is you've created like this really neat believability factor that this could be this could could have been something in real life yeah if I had enough revisionist history yes yeah so is there any way that you have found that you want to maybe start leaning towards like refining that believability Factor like trying to narrow it down so get it more pinpointed in a direction or is it just kind of you're kind of where it's at is where it's at well I think like you know how I how I justify because I think a lot of this the proto-freelancer freelancing is it's what your OCD can stand and that's right mine is what like it's just like how I have to justify this or it's not going to work and it's you know I used history in my favor you know of like when the Illinois Central was cutting down on their main line to save money because they were trying to you know the vet the goal was for them to get bought by Canadian national right so the whole thing about saving money so that's how I Justified Illinois Midland doing the contract switching for for Decatur was yeah you know it's an experiment that you know I because another thing too wasn't you know this experiment of me switching to cater only worked till 1999 because you know the wet noodle came in and took over so uh that's what I got you know Canadian Nationals but uh you know so you know it's you know so I guess that's maybe that's why I stopped at 95 because my whole you know what happens after the up buys SP what you know and then the merger with um you know with Canadian national taking over the IC my whole like you know my my railroad of little lies just falls apart well and I guess that's one of the things is like you have Eric broman's Utah belt you know right um and you know and Alan McClellan the V and all and yeah absolutely I mean and no I I dug these out in the last oh March of March of 2023. there's that here's the V and O's on there yeah you know the v o is in there February 23 why freelance another beautiful little freelance railroad the tenable Western is in there July of 23. this is a gorgeous layout you would never believe how big this layout is by looking at the way he's got this set up this is not a very large layout but it acts like a big layout Michigan Interstate another beautiful layout the gearing towards the Allen McClellan vno the Utah belt making these freelance railroads believable rather than just oh so I'm just gonna do this you know it has really come into its own and and now with the guy like hashtag not sponsored with with uh Chris palomari on it at home shops they've you know with making HO scale cars for freelance railroads uh three Dodge Patrick Harris from three not Three Rod Three Notch yeah uh he makes like I don't know how I've bought in the last two years his freelance covered Hoppers I think I've bought him two dozen in the last few years and like I got a closet full Acura rail cars I need to put together for free his own Railroad and other railroads you know and I'm like he had three for uh he and he comes up with these on his own like he goes over uh statistics for like like soybeans and what each County grows and he comes up with a you know with a based on like the local history like their logo for their County and he comes up with these Freight cars you know and they're he's got one for Indiana I bought three of them it's like Pulaski County Indiana is it near Logansport I think it is I bought three all three of them and you know that it's it's believable because it's like yeah they you know it's Indiana they grow like corn and soy there you know the cars are real and they looked real to me either I'm gonna put them on my railroad you know I'm gonna throw them in a train you know yeah it's it's really kind of it's foreign it's really kind of interesting to uh to see how some of this stuff actually um kind of gets handled in the industry nowadays especially you know um you know Matt like with your with your layout and everything like what are what are some of the things that you're finding for the believability Factor do you find that you're starting to like you said you were starting to lean more and more towards a prototype right but yet you're still doing a freelance type of thing you know is it is are you are you starting to it sounds to me like you're starting to narrow that believability Factor down for your layout yeah I think that um you know for me it's it's as I get to understand well it's as simple as just when you when you when you pick a car up you know at a hobby shop and you're looking at it just just having an understanding of well what years does this car represent is this is this cartoon new for my for my model railroad or is it just far too old um you know when I was first kind of collecting cars I'm modeling the Pacific's Northwest so if it's got to be in on the side of it you know that's good enough for me uh and then as the years go on you realize like oh well this is you know like it didn't make the transition over to BNSF so it's too old for for what I need here this kind of thing so you know for me um it's definitely been the my learning experience my research uh uh into just the world of railroading as I get just a little more knowledgeable um I'm able to kind of focus things down narrow things down and it and that that focus is what's bringing a lot of the believability uh to my freelancing efforts um and it helps having a prototype that you can lean on and say like I'm modeling my version of this thing because when you see a video and you see a bunch of you know uh BNSF paper box cars rolling down the track you know I gotta buy those you know I got I need six of them because they're six rights rolling in front of me right here isn't it the worst feeling you're sitting there watching a train go by and you're like need one of them yeah need one of them yeah I need three of them you know the next thing you know is you're like you're sitting there watching 100 car triangle buying you just spent thirteen hundred dollars you know yeah it's it's ridiculous sometimes you know I mean it Chris what if Chris Bell what about what about you what do you think what are your kind of believability Factor things when it comes to your freelance layout and that's the the question uh is do you have a brand loyalty or buy-in um I know you know a year ago you're talking about you have the Milwaukee type switch stands I mean those kinds of things um the and then taking a look and I can't remember who what it was who it was David Barrow or or Tony Kester model what you see yeah uh yeah so you know that that really you know there aren't palm trees in Iowa uh that kind of thing but it's it's also just kind of you know Iowa Wisconsin look a lot alike but there's some differences and definite differences in in the way towns are laid out I mean that's a rabbit hole I've gone down with history and we're trying to find a typical small town uh you know to model it's like okay where was The Depot at and then that um I think it was a great western book I had that was talking about how they helped plan out towns and of course the depot was right there in downtown you know right at the end of Main Street so uh you know that sort of thing um and then also era you know era specific so you see so many guys I got really into the rabbit hole of cars and in scale in particular you know it's limited um that's where that 3D printing is kind of opening up new avenues um for Scratch building and and but uh believability to me is is that if if you're modeling a region and you're interchanging with certain things uh because if your freelance is part of the real world as it were um what what does that interchange look like even I mean a lot of people don't give a lot of thought to what I mean this is a simple track is it a yard is it uh and then who why is that car there well and who owns who owns that track I mean um pink lady uh ballast on a Northwestern uh line that you interchange with versus just Cinders you know uh because that's what your small railroad pad was that's still in the dirt you know you're in the mud you're you're if you're bottling the Chicago Northwestern and you've got a cnw yard in the mud I mean trust me I mean and it's there's nothing holding anything together you if it rains you feel like you're gonna fall right straight through to the middle of the earth I mean it's bad Maine through Marshalltown Iowa yeah it was it was in the dirt and that was in the 80s it was in highlight but so so with that being said though with what Chris was saying about like what the Northwestern and everything that that comes around to another portion of the believability factor and Clark as an MMR I want I want to hear what you've got to say with that because with a lot of times people take for granted they want their ballast on their layout so pristine and it has to be perfect it's got to be this and railroad yards are unless it's brand spanking new freshly laid Rock it's anything but clean it's anything but perfect so so over the years have you seen a transition with the with freelance layouts getting more and more like the Prototype when it comes to track work well I think for track work especially um you look at a number of layouts especially um I see Tom Johnson and I've never met the gentleman but boy I certainly follow his uh his layout there is uh stuff that he puts out and it's fantastic and Tommy K I know Tom as well and uh or even Mr Gage or that Split Rock there you look at their railroads it's not you know perfect it is what and as somebody said in this in the scene or in the chat and you guys have said it's what you see it doesn't it's not you know it it's like when people are doing uh field grass and stuff it is not bright green nobody goes out in waters beside the rest of the time of year yep yeah and then and that's something Boomer Boomers adamant about doing it if you if you're using static grass paint your grass you know take that tone from out of the package and knock that down because yeah railroad use Roundup you know yep yeah and uh so I think and that's where I think some of that uh um railroads with money well you know yeah railroads with money right with the big stuff okay but but I mean for the most part especially Branch lines and stuff if you look at some of the uh the photos that people have put up from real Fanning oh my God you wonder how the stuff even stays on the track Never mind you know how it's ballasted yeah so I think you know and modelers have to look at that I think uh Chris I think you said about model what you see and I know I was watching in the chat I said that uh uh Mr Johnson said that same thing about modeling and that's what he does and when you look at his scenes wow do they ever jump out at you Paul Mary bigger polymeria would go throw Kudzu in there that's that's that's what I say but but you're you're 100 correct right I mean you it's one of the few things that as a modeler whether we're doing prototype modeling freelance modeling proto-freelance modeling it you know when you're it goes into the ship building ins you know the ship modelers I mean Chris I see you've got a lot of military stuff you must be like do have done military modeling in the past in or and stuff it I mean I like for water for people that model ships and boats water is water but water is always different it's not you know it's not the same Atlantic ocean water looks different than Pacific ocean water and you know in Indian Ocean water looks different than all sorts of Mediterranean Seas look different I mean the water looks different depending on where you are on the globe and and you know and especially you know it's harder to model currents and things like that we could start talking about ballast that way too you might have you might have two railroads that come and get the re their Rock from the exact same Quarry and dump the exact same number of cars and their main lines are going to look vastly different they're they're just gonna be different it's it you know it all concrete ties versus versus wood ties I I don't know very many freelance modelers that model railroads with concrete ties you know I mean that's a that's a big railroad thought process right there you know um well yeah and uh sorry to break in here no no go right ahead that's what we're that's what this is when you're modeling a freelance railroad I think it's it's doubly important that you take a look at those details uh because um you know if you're modeling say you know the BNSF or whatever people generally have an idea of what that is what type of railroad it is how they maintain their equipment uh you know how they maintain their track work and that kind of thing but if you're modeling a freelance railroad you have to tell that story for the person because someone comes coming to your Facebook page or coming to your lab to take a look at your stuff um won't have that backstory won't have all that you know to come to your layout with to all that knowledge so the story you tell through you know how well maintained your track work is or you know how many weeds are in between the track and that kind of thing what the water looks like what the trees look like what the Rock looks like um you know that really sets your railroad your freelance Railroad in a in a in a real environment in a real setting you know telling your story about the economic conditions of your of your Railroad and the the customers around you bear with all that kind of stuff that's storytelling through your modeling process is very very important for a freelance Railroader and and one of those things this is really a real quick Chris before you go with yours with your responsive stuff Heath brings up a really good point here and this is this goes right into like paying attention to those details right I'm when I'm in Heath's corner on this I don't have transitions between my sightings are not higher or lower than the main line you know all my track is the same level but I also my cork is only a 16 thick it's not it's not real I don't have like Midwest what is that Midwest Mania yeah Midwest work Midwest cork I don't have that stuff mine is like five times smaller than that because my railroad is in the dirt so I wanted to model that with the ballast with the subroad dead and and and Heath to answer your question absolutely not you don't need to you don't need to have your your ballast all on uh different levels if you don't or your road bed on different levels if you don't want to do that don't you know and that's the thing that's usually reserved for Mainline high steel class one type railroad type stuff that they so one of the things I do that I forget who kind of instilled that on in me years and years ago was if I'm doing something on the railroad I I mark it down I have a little spiral binder that I keep and I mark it down and my reasoning for it and then I try to keep the same reason through the whole layout so I'm not changing situations I'm not going from one color ballast to another like you know it's not there's a reason for it and that helps me keep me on track I think Matt you were talking about the same thing about you know you're progressing through the layout but you know on a substantial way you get to a certain point and you go what the hell did I do 25 feet background right because it's taken you three months to get to where you are and you forget about it and uh I see there must be another Canadian out here because John garvin's talking about ballast and what in Sudbury and Mike you were up in in the Sudbury area um oh yeah there they took slag from the nickel mines and they use it as Bowers because it was cheap it's readily available and there's a ton of it and there's nothing else to do with it you got that right yeah and like he says well you can't find that in the hobby stores but um it I think I think that's all goes to the believability of your railroad that you're trying to achieve now not everybody wants to do that they'll just keep it in the back of their mind hey don't forget to do this but I think if you if you're like me especially as I'm getting older um I do write things a lot more than what I used to to keep a continuity which then people appreciate in the layout it shows it starts to show up right in the continuity and um I think that's one of the biggest things and it doesn't matter if you're building a large railroad a small railroad um you know a switching shelf if you do certain things and have a reason then you can come back and say oh yeah I remember I wasn't I was just going to keep everything level and the reason is because I'm in the mud no yeah I was just going to ask you I was just going to ask you a question about that Chris are you on multi-levels are you on one level or how do you have your main line all set up and everything well I I got I got cork cheating from Michael's and I went to two different thicknesses and all I did was I just like there's a main line that goes to the middle of the yard and that's going to be on a thicker cork that's you know that's gonna be on a thicker Cork and everything else is gonna be on the thinner core but and I also I'm using 83 and 70. um use a Pico uh but I like go back to the yards there's a professional Railroader on my group named John cordillo who at one time worked for the CSX and I believe he works for the Decatur and Eastern now um but he's he gets some of those pictures I used were that he you know put on my Facebook page and he told me in the mid 90s the the yard the icy yard was full of gopher holes like you had a watch where you step because of gopher holes because of all the spillage you know from the grain for the covered Hoppers and I'm and you know I'm thinking like you know I know I had to put pigeons you know because the pigeons are going to eat the spillage but now I need to maybe get many prints to do to do groundhogs or something like that and put a couple in the yard and like I gotta model a hole like for a gopher you know it's like you know there's Rock there's gonna be holes in the Rock from from the Gophers because they want to eat the corn or the soy you know so it's like that's something I can you know especially like he said the mid 90s was during the during the time I see was before the you know Canadian national took over that was an issue in the yard was gopher holes and you had to watch where you walked yeah so so we're gonna move on to the next little part here and okay let's see here Chris you had a little presentation Clark has a presentation rate uh Matt you have one you've got one and Chris do you have a little one or do you have one too Chris spell just just a short yeah let's start with you I'm about to why don't you queue up your presentation here quick I see and remind me how do we oh present there it is yeah yep you go to present and then share screen and then you should be let's go all right don't worry about it this is our high quality production value that we've always you know all right I don't see anything yet all right there we go here we go all right are you there all right so yep there we go so my here oh there we go all righty well that kind of gives everything away but yeah I want to go to the full screen part of it if you got a full screen look nope that's nothing right now shoot all right well this may or may not work all right so this was one of my first influences so uh this young kid from uh the Minnesota Western I mean a lot of people seem to model variations of the Minnesota Western it was an m in Saint L um uh little piece that they owned uh and I mean he just he had simple ideas you know uh his locomotives he blanked out a little bit of the up on this one and then he actually leased up power um so his idea on a four by eight of vignettes is something that uh took me away and then uh this this guy right here that was my first uh freelance uh drawing back in 89 I didn't know what that's pretty good dude that's actually really really good holy cow that's actually impressively good holy cows but I don't even remember what lnn stood for you know I'm like and knew nothing about paint skis or or I don't even know what I think I copied this out of a Model Railroader um you know they used to have the Black and Whites um so I I did a lot of paper paper railroading um so not in the armchair necessarily um and just like you Mike I heard you're around the layout podcast in rabbit holes I know several and I didn't all I'm being a fan of History you know so um you know I came up with all this paperwork you know for the scheme how to it was gonna be um and then I even came up I had another idea it was the uh Clinton Muscatine and Burlington which that's my initials uh I wrote they were doing a regionals and review thing in their magazine years ago and so I wrote up a whole I was working for the college newspaper and I I used their software and I made my own magazine article 1991. cool I mean totally made that up and then I I had found there was a uh booklet at a antique store and they had it has the actual what these logos are who they are and it was a quiz so um they had the the actual ones in black and white and then on the back it said what railroad owned them I'm like this was a great idea I'll start with um so I I would you know put a piece of tracing paper down because this is the years before the internet or computers at home which 1991 you know who who's gonna have a computer at home um that I use those for ideas and it's like Regional you know like here's Cotton Belt in Reverse so of course they were all reversed so that opened you up to new ideas um because cotton belts is flipped around on that side you know uh and then I came up with the Great Central route which was basically the MNC now and the Wabash and tpnw because I read my wife was going to college at the time and I read I sat in the library for eight hours a day while she was in class because we commuted and I work nights so I would just hang out the College library and I read that tpnw and MNC L tried to merge at one point which would have been a great route around Chicago that would have been a lot of fun to have gone and seen if that would have actually happened right right uh and then uh as this kind of gives away the Kansas City Northern lines was another one that I came up with it was an actual proposed merger of Kansas City Southern and can you guys tell who that would be hmm I don't know I've never seen that logo before I know it's a chicagoan great western yeah really the Lucky Strike yeah I know that with Kansas City Northern Lights yeah hey sure you guys can we do a quick sound check you hear me I came up with two versions of it yeah I hear you fine yep yep you're good Andy yeah all right sorry about that so then being a so I I thought Great Central I had logos I had everything it was kind of based on the everything looked like stuff from England um there so English outline uh they were talking about you know they had backstories and stuff to all their layouts and why this particular engine's on there you know we bought this from that and uh so I I went down that rabbit hole for a while um I can't sit in Northern and then uh being part of uh Des Moines track there was a guy uh Brian Oakley one of his modules was this huge entrance house with BN and BNSF equipment when BNSF was first coming out and it said Des Moines Union uh engine yard or engine terminal I'm like what's that and he's telling me about the Des Moines Union um and of course Des Moines track is DM entrac and I'm like okay freelance you know this is a real Des Moines Union was a railroad it was partly owned by the Wabash partly owned by the Milwaukee and they had their own equipment and then when Milwaukee folded uh in Norfolk Western took over Wabash then Burlington Northern uh kind of took over the Milwaukee share um so I'm like wow you can take a real thing and make it yours you know so uh then I liked scenes trains run so I switched to doing in central Iowa so we can get out in the country and I can get some space because Des Moines Union was all in town and I didn't I didn't make it to the the cut slides but Des Moines Union uh Switched at Iowa Iowa Transfer yard where 10 railroads switched uh interchanged in 14 tracks uh at the base of the Iowa Capitol Building basically uh and kind of right there if if anybody's from Iowa they know Shortline yard it was right next to that um and there was there's a picture on Facebook on my Des Moines Union group uh that there's like 10 stop signs for all the different railroads Crossing each other just to get to that yard yeah so you had to stop make sure the way was clear and they were just simple posts so I'm like okay 10 railroads I can run whatever I want you know it takes a little guesswork out of things doesn't it right it did yeah and it was all my favorite railroads you know the Wabash the Milwaukee the Ammon St L went through their Great Western went through there Rock Island um you know in Chicago Northwestern they're kind of the or railroad they were the board before the Borg took over the Northwestern hey I resembled that remark so yeah it's basically a 12 by 12 area in the basement uh and kind of made an m uh shape layout so it's it's basically Des Moines and now it's going to be Countryside running um to get um you know out here so the Des Moines in central Iowa owned the Fort Dodge Des Moines in southern there was a guy that commented on your uh podcast about freelance week that he's got the Fort Dodge Des Moines and Southern these guys actually owned Fort Dodge Des Moines in southern but they were smaller they just switched basically their bread and butter was uh the Firestone plant here uh and then they had a lot of Industries along this is along the river and this is all now Urban it's all now houses and stuff there's none of these industries left but they had like 30 30 Industries right there that they were switching little mom and pop you know three four cars at a time and then went out to what was what we call Fort is that Fork Des Moines is down here shoot I can't think of that Camp Dodge that's a camp Dodge yeah brain fart Camp Dodge was a big military installation at one time and they had inner urban so you could have inner urban cars and then Frank Ray Road so I'm modeling the 60s when right before the Chicago Northwestern absorbed them and run down here and it didn't really meet the Des Moines Union to get to transfer yard but it will uh so tried to keep it five minutes or less but uh yeah so let me stop sharing here so what are you doing come around is that all N scale or HR or N scale yeah in scale that's so you get a lot of room yeah and I wanted to get open running so that's that is it Ops is it real Fanning and it's that blend of those two because you know from where I grew up um it was kind of like a British layout where I grew up you could want you could hear the Northwestern coming down the Old Hammond Saint L line and they were a mile away but I could see them through the trees and there was like a drove of trees on the right and the left and you'd see the F unit come through and the next uh F unit and then the Jeep and then each car in its turn and I'd sit there with binoculars you know it's a five-year-old seven-year-old watching the trains go through wanna you know one car at a time so you know that that was one thing I wanted to have but uh trying to that believability Factor because uh Des Moines and Central Iowa I mean basically everything on that one of the 30 Industries they took that out the city came out came through and made all those Industries move that's very cool oh Jason Clocky does your line yeah parent company so uh Des Moines Central Iowa um was separate and then Salzburg took it over he was he owned a whole bunch of he was kind of like a modern or uh 1960s version of Watco or rail America uh he had a lot of little railroads um that were like barely profitable um that he tried to keep profitable so the ideally uh and you know my point in central Iowa has some influence from my favorite Wabash in Milwaukee you're gonna see those on there that's very cool yeah um the in the 30 by 60 inch railroad uh I wish I could get those pictures they wouldn't uh load I don't know why computer glitch um but it was just it was it was just uh kind of tucked in a corner uh and it was mostly switching um you know but it I had one long line for interchange in you know whoever could come in you know any of 10 railroads so that's that's pretty cool yeah there you go who do you want to have going next sir Andy yeah um Clark you're the night all right so we'll have you bring down the house here um Matt did you wanna did you get to go yet I know Chris we did your video and talked through yours um so why don't we why don't we go ahead and put Matt up there on the big screen and then we'll get Clark uh to come through and and kind of um talk about how he's changed his tune so to speak here coming down the stretch after uh hanging out with the section crew so okay yeah Matt um let me see here are you doing some sharing and things yeah bring up a little presentation um sorry about the misfire here on my end um I was getting some uh coaching on my volume levels and then I went to do some stuff and things and then I ruined everything because I went and touched something I shouldn't have so and that's the way it always goes yeah Matt uh we'll bring you up here in just a second I see a track plan okay that looks good um but yeah Mike did a fantastic job I was actually sitting there watching without any audio so good work keeping the fires burning and I saw there was quite a bit of heckling from Rey um I wasn't even paying attention to Ray I was trying to keep things moving I'm like wondering where the heck you went and I'm like oh boy this is gonna be great and good job Chris Bell that was really good yeah that was really cool that was very cool tail end of that thank you all right Matt take it away okay so yes I am modeling uh the middle and Falls railroad that's the name of my freelance uh model railroad uh it is based in uh the Pacific Northwest it runs between the towns of usk Washington all the way over to Sandpoint Idaho where it interchanges with the BNSF it's based heavily heavily heavily on the Ponderay Valley Railroad which is the real Shortline railroad that runs uh over uh these tracks um and uh and yeah the layout itself is a 14 by 20 feet um it exists in a room in my basement but I kind of sort of halfway built myself um it's set up uh really for one or possibly two operators to uh spend a couple hours operating on um and then um like a little bit of staging and I've got some space for continuous running so that I can sit back with a beer and just watch trains run around my layout when I'm not in the mood to uh have a throttle in my hands smart yes I like that I like that I subscribe to that theory yeah yeah I actually got a motorman from IO scale engineering hashtag I'm not sponsored just for that and because I'm because I'm a point to point I got it just so that I could have something going back and forth while he drinks his beer while I drink beer yes yeah and I mean honestly for me I didn't have that on my old layout my old layout was just a shelf switcher you know it was about it was about 12 feet long uh and I really missed just watching trains run so for me on this lab it was important to have that option if I wanted to just have the ability to run trains around in circles so freelance model railroaders we love our logos we love our paint schemes we love choosing uh uh you know the locomotives that we're going to represent on our layout and uh I'm very much the same with that for me I was modeling a a a scrappy little short line that was just getting by on very little money and so um every penny counted uh and I wanted that to be reflected in my paint schemes I chose and all of that so um locomotes I'm running on my layout I've got a um and sd40-2 that's an old it's a patched out BNSF that's a patched out BN because my all-time favorite locomotive is a is a Cascade green sd40-2 and it's something you know as a freelance Model Railroader uh you have the opportunity to bring your favorite stuff onto your layout and so this is how I'm doing it here lease units are also very popular amongst a small Short Line uh railroads and so I've got a Helm leasing unit here as well that'll eventually get patched out for the MFR both those units will be weathered down quite a bit um you know we talked a little bit earlier about the story you tell with your model railroading and for Freelancers probably what your locomotives look like what your Rolling Stock looks like is like you know that's the number one way you're telling your story about your freelance layout um so in the lower left there you see a a car that I'm currently weathering and um you know for my layout and I wanted to look old and grungy and used and owned by somebody else before um the Midland Falls got a hold of it and when they did all they did was just slap some paint on it some stencils and then called it a day and so this is just all part of the storytelling that goes with my freelance Railroad uh another great thing that freelance railroaders uh have is you don't have to follow the Prototype necessarily um and so when you have a smaller space like I do and you're limited by you know the shape of it and the fact they have to have swing gates for doors and stuff it's great to not have to like try to force the track plan that closely matches the Prototype into a space and you get to have a little more freedom a little more uh ability to play around a little bit so I've got this one spot on my railroad where um the Ponderay River uh passes the railroad passes over the Ponderay River and uh in my case I have both the Union Pacific track work and the MFR track work passing over the river at the exact same spot it's not like that on the real Railroad on the real railroad they do uh cross the river but they do it at 25 miles apart from each other but uh on my layout I'm doing it side by side and I got a little bit of an angle on them here so they're sort of Crossing almost in a V shape and it's going to really give me a great opportunity to uh model really interesting impactful scene um and I can pull you know the the the real model the real uh the real bridge that the Union Pacific uses the real bridge that the Ponder Valley Railroad uses and bring them into my model railroad and model those for real just side by side um and uh you know have a little fun with that and be able to make an impact in that way um I think it's really important for a freelance Model Railroader to take a look at the real scenery around the location that you're going to be modeling and find a way to incorporate that kind of look and feel into what you're doing in your model railroad while still allowing yourself the freedom to make those adjustments so that something is artistically pleasing to you uh it fits what you your needs are as a modeler the scene that I'm creating here is very much a work in progress um I'm taking the Boomer diorama approach to Scenery where it's gonna be layers and layers and layers until I finally get it to looking the way I want so imagine a lot more bushes and trees and weeds and all sorts of things on this um but on the left we have the real location you're standing on the highway overpass the tracks are running below you there and you've got a large Rock Cut and I wanted that sort of look and feel on my layout somewhere so I'm recreating it here except I'm doing it my way I'm adjusting the shade of the rocks to a slightly different color one that I find a little more pleasing I'm making the rock cutter look a little bit more natural and instead of that rock cut kind of being over the road it's it's over the the train tracks here so taking the the real thing and then skewing and adjusting it kind of making it your own but something that hopefully somebody who you know is visiting from the area can look at and go yeah this looks like the kind of thing that I see back home one of the the major reasons why I chose the pondery Valley Railroad um as my sort of inspiration for my freelance version the bear was because I love two Bay covered hoppers and I wanted an industry somewhere in the Pacific Northwest that used those uh and uh so I just did a quick Google search for cement industry Pacific Northwest I found a little town called Meadowland Falls that had a cement plant I said perfect that's all I need to know and I created the Meadowland Falls railroad based on that getting more research down the road I found out that like uh cement no longer existed in Meadowland Falls I hadn't been there since the early 90s and so uh you know uh that gave me an opportunity to like kind of adjust history a little bit for my layout and so on my layout um the cement plant yeah shut down in the early 90s but they just moved it South they moved it down to us Washington and got it out of metal and falls and built a brand new uh state-of-the-art cement uh plant in US Washington and so that gave me sort of you know it allowed me the freedom to bring cement back to the area and the inspiration you're seeing on the left there is a a cement plant that's in California but I'm using that as I build out my version of it it's going to look quite a bit different from that but it's just inspiration for for what I want to do for my cement plant uh so it's just a way to kind of take sort of the history of a place and update it and allow yourself the freedom to even though I'm doing a much more modern interpretation of the railroad um I can still take a lot of what the history of what made the original the Prototype uh really exciting and bring it into my into my modeling efforts there are a couple really key scenes on the Prototype that I am going to include in my railroad there's a tunnel called the Blue slide tunnel which has a wooden port on one end and this kind of really Unique Concrete one on the other end I'm going to go so far as to actually purchase a uh resin printer so that I can model that that concrete portal as accurately as possible uh and you know this is this is where as we talked earlier like as I'm getting more and more into like the real thing right I I I'm I'm bringing a lot more of those real elements into my freelance version of the layout so yeah uh that's one of those things we're trying to model something as accurately as possible as as it is on the real thing I'm finding that kind of thing to be a lot more exciting no let me ask you a question yeah sure are you gonna model the crack yes 100 of course because see that to me actually gives that whole portal yes a real character to it yeah and it really doesn't it won't look like it's just something like some other cookie cutter portal that actually shows Earth settling and it shows yeah you know it shows that it's been around for a while that's a really sharp that's a really cool looking picture yeah you pull that off that's going to be awesome well and it goes back to telling the story of your of your railroad right I mean this this is railroad that has a ton of History to it and that crack really represents a lot of the age and the history and the fact that the railroad is probably not going to have the money to go back and fix that tunnel portal they're gonna as long as it's holding up you know all the rock above it they're gonna just gonna leave it as is uh so yeah I mean a little details like that I think are really really important for a freelance a modeler to kind of take into account when they are uh designing and building the scenery and that kind of thing the bridge you see on the on the right here I think probably 90 of all the photos that exist of the pondery Valley Railroad is of this bridge uh everything kind of north of us get at this point in time than a modeling which is 2016. uh was all Excursion trains it was a big Excursion chain that would take uh people up to Meadowland Falls and this bridge right here is a really uh sort of a big dramatic scene with the hydroelectric dam below it I'm modeling that as well neither of these two uh scenes here or anywhere near the area that's actually exists on my real life there are many many miles 20 30 miles uh in the case of the bridge away but I I can't I can't not model it they're just too cool I have to be there so I found a way to sort of work it into my plan that's pretty neat yeah and finally last slide uh you may ask well if you're doing if you're doing freelancing why even bother with a prototype you know if if doing things your way is that important to you that you're stepping away from the prototype to kind of venture out on your own as a freelancer why bother with a prototype at all and I think this photo really uh is is one of those things that really draws me back to the Prototype so what you're seeing here is the same scene as the previous slide with that bridge over that Dam but you're seeing it before the the railroad came into the valley this was how people and goods moved up and down the river before the railroad was uh this Steamboat and this is the the steamboat metal line and an awesome tie-in holy cow yeah it's it's really like there's stories of people in one of the most popular things to do on this particular boat was to play a a game of poker while you would make your way up the river and I can't imagine being able to concentrate on my cards when you're going through Rapids like this it's crazy hot paddle boat no less right yeah exactly yeah no kidding right but but the history of the area that I that I've as I've done more and more research you know it started as just it was it was just a cool sounding name with a cement plant and that's all it was you know it's 10 15 years ago now but as I've done more and more research over the years and I've gotten closer and closer to the Prototype it's things like this the history of the area and the people that made the area what it is and um you know how the area has changed over the years as the railroad helped to shape it and bring prosperity to the land and how now a lot of that industry is gone the railroad's starting to struggle it's a really poor area of the country now unfortunately but there's a lot of uh there's a lot of um really interesting sort of history there and interesting things you can do to kind of represent uh that Railroad in your in my in your freelance efforts and so that's why I love freelancing and why I love uh Proto freelancing specifically here we go here's a question here are you gonna are you gonna put the boat on your layout you gotta at least you have to at least model that phone at one point I mean just for just even if you have it on the on the display case on the side near that scene or under the scene to show like the the past and pro the past present type stuff well I'm a big fan of both so I definitely in the future I think I could see myself doing something like that for sure that would be so neat yeah it's it's pretty cool it's pretty cool for sure well that's all I got fantastic that's awesome yeah this is all on one level right yeah it is uh it's all um uh yeah single like in fact I don't even have a grade at all in in the layouts so for operational purposes I want to be able to park a car anywhere and not have a roll away so um even though I'm modeling very mountainous region I'm I'm letting the mountains kind of do the work to kind of give you the feeling of moving moving through the space and and keeping my track work as level as I possibly can and you're all you're H you're ho then ho yep okay yep yeah I I had an N-Scale layout back in the day and I liked it but when I got back into the hobby I got back into the hobby uh when I walked into a train shop one day and I picked up an Athen uh two Bay covered Hopper and I saw a photo etched roof walks and all these little wire grab irons and details on a car that was like 20 bucks and I was like oh my gosh this really this exists like I was away from the hobby for a few years I come back and now this exists this is incredible you know so so I moved to Ho at that point yeah so I have a I have a question uh real quick Matt so what's been your biggest challenge is you um I don't know if you if you cover this in your presentation but um so you know you got a lot of great ideas and and things that we're all dying to see come to to life here but um what so far on on your journey what's been your biggest challenge with your layout well actually your freelance railroad I should say yeah I I think it's just I think operations has been my biggest challenge in fact I'm I'm fine I have an uh my first operating session is happening in two weeks and I'm fighting jmri to get a switch list that makes sense for my layout right now and I'm struggling with it and I uh it's it's it's it's been an issue but um being someone who when I first came into the hobby it was very much about the models um you know the the scenery painting backdrops all that kind of you know making it look realistic and make it feel realistic that was the trains part of it was kind of was kind of like the icing on the cake it was it was modeling with something cool moving through the scene right um and now that I'm kind of getting older and I'm getting more into the trains part of it learning how learning the operations learning how you know stuff moves around on a layout uh or in real life I think that that is a little bit of a struggle I mean I've read Model Railroader over the years and I've I I I read what everyone else says about operations and some of it goes over my head I'm I'm learning you know I'm learning as I go um I'm pretty I run this layout here enough um that I'm pretty darn happy with how it's how it's running now myself I'm nervous about bringing other people in who have a lot more experiential operations what they're going to say about it um but that might be the best thing to do though really yeah yeah I I I'm pretty happy with the track plan as it exists now and I and I think um I think there's a lot I think there's gonna have flexibility there and I think it I think it's it's going to work just fine um a great thing about having a prototype to work from is you've got you've you've got you know you've got it right there you know how the Prototype ran you knew you know the industries they serve how often they serve them how many cars they took where those cars came from where they go to so that helps out quite a bit so as much as as much as possible one of the really hard things about the the Prototype that I'm using is there's it's there's seemingly very little information about it out there and available not a lot of people seem to rail fan it there's like four or five videos on YouTube for it and that's about it um there's there's a uh an issue of um of uh was a rail fan railroad rail fan and railroad magazine yeah um that features that features that prototype and oh my gosh there's pictures from different angles I'd never seen before it was so exciting to get that and I got just a little bit more information and and so ah you know any any of these little bits of information I can gather um I cling on to it because uh it's so it's so precious to me because there's so little of it and that's not the rabbit hole isn't it a freelancing is finding that information trying I mean yeah yeah well it's a bouncing act because you want you want that freedom to do it your way right but you know in order to make it look and feel real and to sort of satisfy you know uh you want to do it justice oh yeah yeah I definitely want to do the pondery valley and the people who live there and the struggle that they've had over the years you know the the um I want to do all that Justice in my modeling yeah and so it's really important to me to kind of get it right and get the look and the feel of it right so yeah one other thing just as a suggestion is I don't know about where oh by you guys or any other parts of the country or Clark even up in Canada but like in Wisconsin a lot of small towns have their own historical societies and so those can be amazing you can find out like for your local Township historical society or your County Historical Society find out if there's information from them because they may have information that goes way way back that nobody ever sure thinks about anymore you know there's a Facebook page because I found a bunch of photos yeah like Pages really really good liquor lost Des Moines Pinterest Believe It or Not Pinterest doesn't our one Flickr you know all those places are just there's so many resources now you know it's awesome yeah I live in Central Illinois and and so I am on a number of Facebook groups of like Pacific Northwest or Washington State or uh Idaho uh rail fans and so I get I'm on I'm on their group so every time they you know they get a shot of anywhere near standpoint oh these inner standpoint where's the ad standpoint I'm looking it up on a map and I got Google Maps up triangulate and figure out like where it is and yeah your ears perk right up yeah exactly yeah yeah I do the same thing I follow uh history of the Heartland and uh mid-century Decatur and it's like you know I I've learned a lot in the last two years by being those Facebook groups because I'm not from there you know I never so I'm 800 miles away and I've learned stuff all the time like I just posted pictures the other day of uh of a Canadian national engine going over on the bridge over Pershing Road and then it's like you know I'm like oh yeah I know where this is like and it was on their page I'm like you know and once a while you'll see Wabash uh Chris you would like it they because you know Decatur was yeah Wabash Hub uh you know their main shops it keeps popping up as a suggestion for something yeah we used to follow it so yeah but you know it's it's a great resource you know especially for someone who's not from Illinois you know you know never other than going to boot camp never lived in Illinois so but yeah hey I don't know if we uh if we touched on this real quick we do have a question uh we'll take one of these quick and then carry on um Robert gleitz says any recommendations for buying decals for your freelance Road circus City decals but you're gonna pay for them um he's not going to be he's not going to be cheap um you know but he's very easy to work with and but he does charge a setup fee and he's you know he's for your first set of decals you know um so circus City would be a good one that I would recommend highball Graphics high ball Graphics would be another good one to go with um Precision design company Precision design yeah I'm about to reach out to uh circus City myself for for my first sheet of of decals so it's good to know that he's a easy to work with what was yeah he fails again position uh PD Precision design company um so he uh did the first run of the mass scooten Valley uh decals is uh for me and that was that was a good experience he was really good I've gotten stuff from circus City I like them but then our friends over at around the layout podcast um they they recommend highball Graphics yep um and yeah they they've been around for a long time they do a lot of good stuff too yeah talking about Regional yeah yeah I I came that close to investing in a laser prayer [Laughter] I did I did get that I got the testers you know stuff and I've printed out a couple of things and mixed results with that doing your own um but that's the graphics I'm kind of a failed artist I guess you'd say you know having done all things yeah I don't think Randy uh Andy saw the picture of that out of that the hand-drawn one and then you know back in the days again before the internet um I take those articles about like the GPA teams that uh Model Railroader would have an idea the heck out of them and then I just I have like 18 pages of different types of uh uh paint schemes and I I was looking at stuff from France and stuff something to make it look different there was a guy who was saying but why not run an Australian sd70 Ace because they do look different they're kind of cool looking and ideal yeah and one of the rabbit holes I went down I found a crazy uh book about early diesels in like Germany and Russia were big on on dieselization early on and what their stuff looked like yeah and I I almost I I had a scratch built N scale thing that it it failed miserably it looked horrible so it went in the trash it it went against the wall it was a great idea yeah the literal Wabash yeah there you go it's already interrupt as we as we keep uh having discussion here Clark um did you want to bring up uh your presentation that's not uh while he's doing that we'll keep keep uh chin wagon here about uh Matt and and the rabbit holes sure see the best thing to do is to strap a two by four by twelve on your ass so you don't go down those rabbit holes um because I've got a way out to build I can't go down all these nut crap holes and stuff now Matt honestly your whole presentation um you just keep talking and I'll show my slides because you and I uh apparently are coming from the same area um it's amazing how you think about how I think about layouts so that was pretty cool cool all right well um so I do want to uh just to remind the folks out in the section crew this evening um you know if you have questions for us get them out there into the into the chat and then at the end of this evening um at the end of the show this evening we will be giving away that home shops uh freelance Road for Michigan Interstate it's a tangent PS2 4750 covered Hopper so make sure you guys stick around to the end and again yes thank you Matt that was a really cool uh presentation um I I I've always been a big fan of your your railroad but it was really neat to see uh the behind the scenes 10. we're giving upgrades Andy I'm glad you're back because I got no idea how to get done that giveaway so yeah yeah um I had no clue I'm like okay how am I gonna get the spinny thing to work or how am I gonna do that yeah it was my dumbass trying to make audio updates on the audio uh adjustments on the Fly and see I told you I told you in the pre-show it was it was jinxed from go we were Jinx from ghosts right yeah see right I told you guys didn't I I said it I'm just saying I'm not saying but I'm saying so are we all set there clerk yeah I was uh oh well now it says remove Andy dorsh why does it say remove Andy dwarsham I think oh that's because that's what you there you go USSR judge 7.5 [Laughter] Clark you're up and running here um for the freelance and the Prototype or as I say uh my railroad following a railroad yeah so um there's a little bit of introduction and we'll go through everything and then uh Andy I'm on full screen on my page so you'll have to just tell me or ask me questions as we go you're good to go I'll queue them up as we get them there Clark so where I'm actually modeling is the Huron Central which is part of the Genesee and Wyoming family they took over from Canadian Pacific um I'm not a big kind of if I was going to follow the Huron Central it would limit me to equipment and to moto power so I kind of shied away from that one of the questions that uh uh people were asking like how far do you guys live away from a prototype I live about uh well 20 miles from the main line of the Huron Central and we'll talk about that as we go so if you don't know who I am um this is a little bit about me I've been uh involved in the Anna Marie as as Andy sort of introduced me I've been the vice president I've MMR 225 which is a old number because I'm an old guy I if you've ever been to uh an Anna Marie convention maybe come and took mine with the Masters I developed it and then do Hands-On programs for the nmra uh in our region I was twice president Anna Murray Canada president blah blah blah uh I was the host of the chairman uh for or vice chairman for the Toronto Convention for the nmra uh we were going to be the largest convention ever in the nmra we had over 3 000 people booked and then SARS hit and we still ended up with 1700 people coming to Toronto uh for that convention so that was pretty good uh I've been on a past host of tree Masters TV for model railroad hobbyists talked to a lot of people there mono railroad regular on uh model rail radio new tracks modeling I also taught a night school course for many years and a couple people wanted to use my syllabus including John Saxon is an MMR and he taught in Australia for four years and I thought that was kind of neat um I'm a rubber Gauger I model in anything um it's I just love modeling uh right now I'm building an ho layout but I do have lots of t-track I probably have 25 modules um I rescued an Owen I actually rescued 20130 layouts and one uh ho and three layout um one is the Erie Aggregates which was on the face of uh um Craftsman a few years ago I have that and uh and a few others so um I live in Elliott Lake Ontario now I lived in the Toronto area and was a paramedic for 35 years and uh did lots of stuff yeah it was it was it was a uh fabulous uh career but now I live up in the middle of nowhere and uh our little town is 10 000 people uh so here's Elliott Lake way up here um what we're actually going to be talking about it didn't really Market on this map but Sudbury is right here in Sault Ste Marie Michigan is here and basically that yellow line is actually what's called Trans Canada highway or Highway 17 in this area um it is uh basically the route of the Huron Central in this area uh I was out fishing this is actually on Lake Ontario last Saturday and uh I hear the rumble and got out my camera which is usually reserved for the fish I'm catching but on this case I was catching other items and uh some trains that's a pretty good catch there Clark well we we caught a lot of fish actually but yeah no this was a great catch and uh it's a pretty remote area up here um you know the two major spots are Sue and Sudbury and Mike has recently been up here he'll tell you there's not much up here but Moose and beaver and deer and rock rock water trees that's my saying uh when I when I retired they said where are you gonna go I said rock water trees baby that's where I'm going whoops so as we talked about here's uh sort of the the headquarters in Sault Ste Marie Michigan our Sault Ste Marie Ontario uh it was the predecessor was Canadian Pacific Railway they ran this this uh section and it's roughly 173 miles so it's not a huge Railroad um we talked about this now I don't really I don't know if I wrote this or if I got it from somebody but this is what I was talking about earlier when somebody said you know what is prototype freelance and uh again it's just about moderators and you know to agree we're all Frodo Freelancers so it's uh really impossible to model all the shortest all but the shortest railroads and uh um so we're all kind of Proto Freelancers in a way and then the three groups I talked about layouts that draw heavily from one or more Turtle types a layout that uh or more specific railroads real or fictional and what if scenarios uh kind of what Chris was talking about about his railroad where he where he actually bought another Railroad and then of course the third one is the fictional railroad which which is great I mean if if you have that in your head and you can sort of uh figure that out I'm not sort of I'm okay with some practices of that fictional stuff but I can't get there to make it realistic so I tend to fall back sort of to the first two where I lean on the Prototype um actually this was just today I had to run over to Sudbury which is two and a half hours from me just to get there one way and uh um this was sitting there with a train and uh they're getting ready to go to uh the Sioux that's actually facing west on the main line and uh these guys are from uh these two locomotives were from Ottawa uh Valley or ovar and I guess they're doing some maintenance on maybe the uh here on Central ones but basically they're same same locomotive as just you know it's got the fainted different logo here I got pictures of that and video of that one that said also when I went up there do you oh yeah yeah yeah I wish I wish I would have known you were here because I it would have been we could have had a neat time anyway uh here's kind of the line from Sudbury Ontario you can see where old virgin's in here and over goes to Ottawa the capital of uh Ontario or a capital of Canada it goes over there so there isn't much along here there's about 16 regular customers that they serve now in Sudbury there's the connection to uh you can already see it's already been changed when I went on their site to cpkc and here in the zoo it's on CN and this is you know you've probably heard of the Algoma Central Railroad that's all up through here in agawa Canyon is up through here so this goes up the hawk Junction where the CN meets um its main line basically and this was kind of neat 199 storage spots available is uh as we were talking earlier uh Mike you were talking about uh um you know how railroads make money there's there's one other ways to make money this railroad was really on the cusp of dying uh last November the government came in and gave him some money and they decided that they would continue so on my uh railroad this is sort of the Railway situate being Sudbury which represented a my Railroad by hidden staging tracks single main line two two passing sightings that are very long and again the end of the line is Sault Ste Marie in the middle is a town um called McCarroll now McCarroll is really a main line and two tracks and there's a y there and they have a couple trailers and that is sort of the middle of the line and then that y goes into Espanola Ontario now Espanola has got a huge paper uh facility and it boy you go into Espanola sometimes and it stinks and all the locals say is that's the smell of money baby because it makes that town it keeps that town alive really um and it's it's pretty cool so I modeled Espanola which is actually in the hallway now it's much different than what it would be in real life but it's in the actually hallway on the entrance to my layout room so this is Espanola here on the right and then you would go through the door into the to the main layout room this is a shelf layout it's uh roughly uh 15 feet or 15 inches wide by eight feet and I've just started really to do some scenery in here I've I haven't really done much so this is Espanola paper here um sort of representing portion of their of their company and there's a sort of wide view of it these drawers underneath here are all for staging they each hold six this track actually um is is I call it a CP interchange so there's six spots in here for the cars and this so there's six spots in here for this industry and this uh kind of this is a cementary and there's a loading dock that usually goes in here with four class and stuff so they do um that's the plan and so there's another six cars in there because like everybody else I have more cars and spots the middle drawer is actually for all the electronics uh all the lighting is done in these buildings with um uh like an LCD it's it's and they're bi-color they're well they're actually they're multi-color you you program them to what color you want and when the lights when when the lights go out in the valance all the lighting comes up in the buildings and they and they change color and then when you turn the lighting back on on the balance they go out hey Clark yes what are you using for lighting in your Valance it looks very I guess War nice and warm yeah there's a Canadian company out of Edmonton uh that's how's LED lighting it's uh 5000 Kelvin okay um there's a gentleman here when I was in my Narrow Gauge uh group uh named uh uh Jerry uh Cornwall Jerry used to own Mount albertscale Lumber and um I know I've known Jerry a long time um and he is a lighting professional so he does a lot of lighting clinics and stuff and years ago I had him over at my home for a different layout that was a Narrow Gauge layout and he explained all he spent a whole day with me on lighting and about what you want to do and uh so I learned a lot from him so that's what I what I use now for him so this is the entrance it goes through the wall um into the main layout room this is a plastic pellet facility you know from Walters but the colors are actually from a pellet uh supplier in the Toronto area on off the highway that's the colors that they use and I thought it was kind of neat to add some color to the layout I use Touch toggles on everything okay so these are all and this is all hand laid for some of you don't know I I'm very good friends with uh Tim where the fast tracks and I do all the demos that most of the shows for him yeah so when you walk in when you walk in the the room and you sort of immediately turn that tunnel um which is kind of crappy I meant to put I have to put uh some kind of in there that's actually the drywall sticking out it goes that's the entrance into uh Espanola and you'll see where there's valence that scene for the big heavy scenery is done I don't put any valence in until the scenery is done so this is when you first walk in the room so that width is just about six feet wide that aisle um and we are talking about space Mike you were talking about space so this is my space I like to watch the the trains run and uh this Mike you'll laugh because you were there at McCarroll there's like uh a nursery and another building yeah highway from the tracks it's like yes they are oh yeah they are yeah because the highway would be here in the aisle yep and the buildings are on the other side of the highway yes yep but I'm a building person I love buildings and I love scratch building I'm gonna love building laser kits I I've made my own kits uh and used Tim's machines so I had to have space for buildings yeah right um this is my Geezer gate I gotta have one of those it drops down uh and uh it drops down and then walks into place underneath with two uh bolts and uh it's all wired in through here now um there's that edge of that Espanola on the outside there so here's the op go ahead we got a couple questions uh before we carry on to the next tier so real quick going back to the lights uh yeah in the valance what do you use for uh lighting control and are they dimmable they are dimmable uh actually I um what all my layout has got you so from the wall out I I on the post here I have uh bars Power Bars yeah okay and um over here is the main guts it's all I have uh two uh 5 amp nce units and and the lighting actually this they all join up they all interconnect the lighting okay so yep so right from here to here which is about 20 four feet somewhere around there they're all one piece and then I had the cord goes in behind here I I use uh styrene to curve the corners and there's just Irene and I just glue them up and then and I use Thirty thou so it's easy to Mud that corner to hide them so there's a there's a break in that corner obviously so when at this end um let me show you that no yeah so at this end when the lighting comes down here there's that Loop there's a piece like this and I just throw the cord back over it you can't see it right it comes down to the post now all those posts are numbered I have four posts and what I did I went on Amazon and I bought the Clickers you know clap on clap off type of thing also when I don't have to crawl underneath the layout I don't do anything like that I can click all on or I can click them on one at a time that's cool now in this layer now in in this room and I should talk about this these are LED panels there's one here and one here and there at the same Kelvin as what these are now there you go when I'm working on the layout I just put these on I don't have the underneath lighting here these are off you can tell and it's just that room is strictly those LEDs under here and again I'm not finished all the way along here so there is no balance yet that will all it'll all be balanced and only lighting over the layout sure and it it you may say well what's that got to do with prototype or freelance but I think when when I was developing the whole scenario of the layout I thought about each and every individual piece my scenery my how am I going to light it because I think it has to be go hand in hand yeah and so critical part of your railroad yeah so and then I put you know I like it I like it nice and sharp now this is a fairly long long span so I have a chain that comes down there's one by twos going across here and I have a chain come down and then there's a turnbuckle on it and I can adjust it so that there's no it's not bending or nothing yeah you can cantilever yeah so yeah so I and that's a long run nice so um I don't know if that helps anybody no that that certainly helped the a handful of people in the chat they're asking questions about it now this I forgot the term now this is kind of like a a layout without a helix it crosses over itself twice it crosses over here once and at the other end whoops and at this end under here okay and I'll explain that so when you come out of McCarroll yard you're up on high and you come across that uh Geezer gate and you're gonna come through the bridges that's a 1.8 percent grade down and eventually you you go into the tunnel on this corner here let me show you whoops whoops I've got to go back here so you're gonna you're going down 1.8 you go into this tunnel and then all this is open so you can see your train go into the hidden part and then all that these areas are open so that there's junk in here but um this yard is actually duplicated underneath here and that's my staging that's cool and then and then when you oops let me see sorry and then so when you come out of staging you're on that bottom piece okay and you can go to Espanola or you can go through this tunnel which there are no tunnels on this line I didn't want I I tried to hide it that it was a loop so like you weren't seeing the train all the time and then it comes back up and then starts through mccarrel again so you go around the room twice basically now one of the features I really liked and and Mike you went by this going on your way to Sudbury this is at the Spanish River uh it's fairly close to Sudbury probably about well say close uh about an hour and 20 minutes um and this scene always fascinated me and so they've got the you know the old trust bridge and it's over the Spanish River now this flows about oh two miles Downstream and then you're on to Lake Huron that's not an easy bridge to get a picture of either it isn't it's terrible um and so I'm on the highway here this is this is a it's only two lanes and you got to be very careful because the trucks are going across Canada you have to realize in Canada we have what's called Trans Canada Highway ninety percent of all the population live 150 miles from the from the U.S border North that's it so the main highway there is one basically Main Highway there's other ones that will reconnect and you go up further but if you want to go from one end of the country to the other you get on Highway Trans Canada Highway and just keep heading east or west so it's pretty busy so here's here's the the bridge uh Trans Canada and in Ontario it's only two lanes so you got to be very careful and here's this uh bridge now I always wanted one of these and I was at a at Springfield and the bmla Bridge really fitted their brass but they they were gone and I couldn't even afford them at the time and there was a guy selling them in a used booth there and I said ooh and he says well I got two oh how much do you want for them more is always better so I said you know what I wanted a big scene so here's the start of that scene and I got the bridges sort of sitting in and a little tip never ever do water over full meal foam you always want to do it over plywood anyway um and then you want to look at your rock work so this is the real rock this is like two minutes away from my home and here's what I duplicated in the plaster and here's uh some more plaster work that I was doing to get the rock work right and that's what it looked like now that's pretty much it so yeah yeah and rock water trees baby yeah so um you know I it it really lended itself to to the type of scenery I like to do which is Rock work and of course you've got your rdcs Mike yeah that's my passenger service on the line now there's your freelance portion of it right yes yeah yeah yeah and uh so they actually uh will go around the layout but then they go into Espanola to the little station there and then they come out and go to the station here now I use nce um and the other thing I again I like it real finished look and Tim over at uh fast tracks I was at the shop and I brought some black a walnut and we cut all these pieces so in the on the laser and here's the North Shore division in areas so here's Sudbury in the Sioux these are all the touch toggles if you're not familiar with them they hook up to your tortoise when you touch them green is straight when you touch them and I mean just touch them they'll turn to red and that indicates now that you're on the diverging Road um these tell me in the Hidden Track uh where my where there's trains in those in those uh tracks and which way they're headed so uh when I pull a train in I park it so that the the light comes on with the engine and this one should be out because then you know you're clear of the turnout and this is about three inches away from any turnout so you got these two heading towards Sudbury these two are heading towards Sault Ste Marie and this this track is more of a run around but I do Park the rdcs on them um these vertical uh ones are for the uh for the open yard that you can see and uh here's the open yard here's and this yard basically is duplicated underneath so if you like when people come and say well what does the yard look underneath I said well you're looking at it on top except for there's no Industries it's just the yard and here's what I did I built all this uh before I put the top on and I built all the turnouts uh pre-weight amount and I built all the turnouts in here and put all the turnout Motors on before I even put them in here so I didn't have to reach under and uh you got the CN North Shore division 7 RS 18. uh actually that's a that's a high Hood uh it's a 199 and uh our good friend Ralph the mud father runs that he did that one for me and then uh you've got uh of course rail Fanning it seems legit that's funny and so that's oh that this is my workbench it slides in and out um everybody should have a TV I built mine right into the fascia and my my electric uh fireplace so hey Clark yeah what do you do do you take models and stuff with you down to Arizona in the winter yeah and um being a Narrow Gauge guy I have a uh hun 3 set of modules down there Mike Scott is uh now Mike what kind of hat do you call that that's a toque right and I was following along there aren't very many of these around but I was following I got this from the train Master of the Huron Central and it shows like here's Espanola yeah it's the whole book yeah very cool yeah that's pretty funny well when when we did the pre-show he goes Clark you're not going to believe it but I I scouted that and I went what really when but I was in Arizona so yeah and uh yeah but uh so anyway that's now Mike you have seen the railroad what do you think of the modeling to it pretty darn close I mean like you say you have to take some you have to take some liberties with you know modeler's license you know what I mean I mean having having driven up there and having seen the topography and I mean that that transcon highway is no joke there is nowhere to turn around yeah you know um you you have to be very selective with with where you where you uh do certain things and and I was lucky because uh I was I had the train master was helping me guide where the train was and who to talk to and where things were so I didn't have to try to hunt for a whole lot everything was kind of there yeah which was kind of cheating but I mean hey hey you take what you get right I have a good friend in Sudbury who's a a doctor and uh he he used to know those Crews very well until they really clamped down on nobody in the yard yeah and uh but he would uh yeah he'd give me some he'd phone up and go hey yeah such and such you might be wondering you'll you'll want to go down look and you know Matt you were talking about and car and we were talking about cars and you were doing it too Mike about I kept seeing these slurry cars and I went okay I gotta research this oh slurry okay it's used they use it from for uh whitening paper yep yep but but then I found out once they whiten the paper they still use it it goes to Sault Ste Marie now and they use it for scrubbing the smokestacks oh sure yep and not anymore because in the last two years they've gone all electric but um they they would take that and they would scrub the uh uh they would scrub the smokestacks and then there was there was like a third thing and I can't remember was and I thought wow that just added to my you know traffic immensely yeah and it was nice that uh Athen came out with the slurry curve so that was good yeah no it looks pretty good I I like it thank you so if I don't know if anybody has any questions and then I guess Mike you're on I am curious about your uh your your drop a leaf or oh yeah yeah your drop gate there because I have user gate the Geezer gate baby I have two of those on my layout and I'm finding them to be Troublesome it seems a couple times a year I have to kind of go back and make adjustments to the the rail heads and stuff to make sure everything lines up again how how well have you been able to like get yours to well the the rail head I've never really had a problem with mine is is swelling yeah that's what I have too because we have a little bit of humidity and I've got actually I've got the the humidifier right there at the gate but um what a long time ago uh forget who told me this but I've done it ever since for years is I lay the track down like put the date up and then lay all the track right right and then when I get it when it's perfect I take five minute epoxy and I weigh five minute epoxy for about six inches on either side of that and I get it on the outside obviously and you get it right to the top of the rail so it's in contact with the rail hmm and then you let that Harden and then I come back with a uh I don't use a Dremel uh thing because I find the spacing too well especially when I'm doing like the fast tracks turnouts and that I use a a uh actually it's a dentist one with uh uh diamonds in it and it's only five thousand oh okay wow so when it cuts it makes it you hardly ever hear any click hoodie clack because the five thou right so I cut that and then um it just swings down and comes back into place I never have the rails going out of line and people say well what about ballasting I can tell you you'll you won't see it once you bounced it sure yeah it seems that my biggest problem has just been the wood swelling it seems like the rails ten you know I got them soldered down to screws that are screwed into the woods yeah so they stay in place but the the wood around it and I think even the walls are like between Summer and the winter like the walls are swelling and moving the whole thing around it's it's it's a It's Tricky it is um we have the same same problem here uh um and you know like tonight it's pretty cool so we won't uh um we won't have the air conditioner on but during the day of course we'd put the air conditioner on but um you know if it's hot enough and that helps with the humidity but you're never gonna get that that all out you're just not going to get it so it that is a problem every once in a while winter is no problem but uh sometimes in the winter you have shrinkage wouldn't you because the the lack of humidity and you're right it's cold yeah it gets really dry I've seen two guys use metal on their Geezer Gates yeah yeah just because of that swelling yeah that their interface is is metal to compensate for that you can use this to that angle Tom Hawley said he is a geezer I I know that so but um yeah it's I think this year has been probably the worst and that that Gate's been up about five years I think now and still no scenery on it but we'll get to it and you drop down how how wide does it span that is uh 18 inches 18 inches okay yeah and there's two tracks there okay I can't remember did it have scenery on it or not yet not yet oh okay it will okay because I've seen that too where they don't do any scenery on it already I'll put scenery on it I mean I'm not gonna put uh uh a high level of uh you know finicky little things but it'll have static grass or you know a little bit of water something or whatever that's outstanding Clark well thank you into the chat uh this evening um and and for for the rest of the panel for that matter for Chris or Chris and Matt um any any final questions um you know make sure that that we get them in here um Mike um did you want to do Farland terminal this evening couple people have asked yeah again I got it I got it all set here all right you sound like you're in a tunnel by the way yeah I disconnect my microphone it's not working tonight so oh okay gotcha yeah you're up against that you know yeah I'm just gonna answer uh Ralph's uh he wanted to know how long that bridge is and that bridge is uh uh the Geezer gate is a boat 30 inches I guess maybe 31 because it's the width of the door perfect one wow sounds like the next political Scandal Geezer gate right all right let's see here comes our high quality production value I gotta go see let's see what do I do here I gotta go do I do this first no that's not right do this and then here here and you could stop and that's it and there can you see all that all right yep yep all right oh there we go hot dog all right this is my Farland terminal railroad synopsis type thing um so a modeling 1992 93 um there's a reason for it I kept changing from the 80s to the early 90s and the reason I ended up deciding on the early 90s is because that's really when I started my railroad career and um the railroad Dakota rail really was inspirational for my Farland terminal railroad um it I really never paid attention to a lot of stuff prior to that um I mean I did but I never you know I didn't understand now now I'm starting it into a point where I understand and I have memories of how things went and what happened so the uh the town of Farland is completely fictional uh it's actually the name of the road that I live on uh I I live on Farland Avenue and um and so I just call it the Farland terminal uh it's a last mile railroad that's about 10 miles long um it has got an inspiration here you see a Dakota rail uh former Milwaukee Road sw1200 uh this was their everyday switch engine that they used and this was their Road power everything the whole Dakota rail was 44 miles long and I think they had a grand total of 10 customers on the 44 miles so not a whole lot um I I just uh made the operations I came up with the date of uh that's my birthday uh and I also have it set up that it's a former Wisconsin and Midwestern Branch not a Wisconsin a Midwestern is my very first uh freelance railroad that I still have I I use it and model it uh I'm gonna be modeling a little bit of power for it um and uh some Freight cars for it as well so the Wisconsin Midwestern will be making a appearance on My Farland terminal layout um the basic Commodities are canned goods grains fertilizer Lumber paper Sandstone the gamut of stuff that you typically would see on a short line Wisconsin style layout or a railroad um the the neat thing is is I've decided I'm only going to have one engine um I've only got one engine for the entire railroad um and I in 1979 uh the Farland terminal got into the per diem boxcar craze and bought a look just like a lot of railroads did bought a hundred FMC 5347 boxcars of which there was only 30 left on the active roster so the railroad actually only has 30 of those cars left the other 70 are spread to the four corners of the railroad universe and could be found almost anywhere and probably patched out and all sorts of stuff by this time you know so I've done a lot to kind of create a history of my railroad being so small here is a really highly detailed map that I was painstakingly a lot of effort to put into this to show where the Farland terminal kind of sits so I don't know can you see my cursor Andy can you see that oh yeah okay this is this is Green Bay right here this is where I live the Green Bay and Western goes east west from Kiwani Wisconsin out west in 1992 the Wisconsin Central was only came uh North South Via the shuttle sub up to Argonne Junction and but they came over into Green Bay via the gbw at that point uh the Wisconsin Midwestern actually goes diagonal out of out of Green Bay the Fox River Valley Railroad had two lines out of Green Bay one for the Lakeshore sub and one for the valley sub this is a former Chicago Northwestern line uh the Escanaba and Lake Superior went North out of Green Bay and the Chicago Northwestern came into uh or connected with the Els uh right outside of Duck Creek Wisconsin and that went North and so this is kind of the way things looked in 1992. so I'm the 10 Mile Farland terminal is off the Wisconsin Midwestern right there it's away from everything else so I don't have a lot of connections with any of the other railroads but yet I do have direct access to all the railroads in Green Bay via the Wisconsin Midwestern so it might not be outside the realm of possibility that a Chicago and Northwestern or an frvr gp9 might need to be used on the Farland terminal when my switch engine needs to go in to be serviced because we I talked about the outside looking in or the inside looking out one of that aspects is is the power every 92 days has to be inspected and when that happens it has to go to a shop facility Well my railroad doesn't have a shop facility so it goes to the Wisconsin Midwestern facility in Green Bay and the in return because I still have to have day-to-day operations I get an engine from somebody that that I'm leasing an engine from you never know what it's going to be yeah this is a little bit more uh High a little bit more detailed uh map explaining where my stuff is um Farland Junction is is the interchange with the Wisconsin Midwestern um then you get to the the town of noidia and uh yep that is exactly the way it looks uh I am taking great liberties with the pronunciation of that and I don't care what people think I think it's hilarious because that's the first thing I ask myself is I'm like okay what am I going to call the town where this gravel and sand transload facility is and uh and I'm like I got no idea oh no idea make it one word no idea so that's the way it's gonna be um it is an Indian name you know it means help there's a pig in my kitchen uh in the Press so the pronunciation is very Wisconsin it is right so I I'm trying to stay true to form here a little bit uh right here I I named I'm gonna have a bridge scene and everything with a little Crick slash River underneath it I just named it after my wife um just because I mean she's been very supportive and I just kind of wanted to do something nice so I you know thought I'd name the river after her and then in the town of Farland uh these are what we're gonna have we got a general purpose Warehouse fertilizer plant Co-op and then there's going to be the engine facility is going to be in there uh operations you're gonna have one job per session uh you could run multiple sessions in a night You're Gonna Go from the town of Farland okay you're gonna go from here you're gonna do the work in Farland take the train all the way to noidia switch out the gravel and sand facility if needed then take that to Farland Junction I can't believe I just noticed I misspelled my own town name yeah follower in fallorin who what idiot did that oh geez whatever so then once you get the furl injunction you get done swapping the uh your train Up For What the Wisconsin Midwestern has left you'd make a beeline directly back to Farland and then what you do is you cut the tree you'll cut the train off on the side or on the main line put the Power away and that's your day the next session comes around you can take the power out and you start the whole process all over again that's going to be it's very similar to the way things were done on the coder rail ah yeah very very similar um you would and Dakota rail they would come out of The Engine House they would switch 3M and they would take off and head uh 3M in Hutchinson Minnesota and then they would head out to the east towards uh watika and or was it Wayzata Wayzata was why is that a yeah there you go remember there we go you'd head out to the to the east that way and you might do one or two small little locations but on the way back you either um you stopped it silver there was an engine house at Silver Lake I think the name of town was and then one at Hutchinson and you could stop in either one of those spots if you had you know so but I'm not going to that part because my railroad's only 10 miles long but uh this pretty much explains that exact scene that thing here's some Inspirations for the industries this industry on the top is called Bay one it's a Concrete Warehouse and the bottom this is called Bay three at one point these were owned by the same place um they're a lot of paper storage things like that I used to switch both of them and what I did was as I kind of combined the two so this is this is going to be the warehouse I did this using a lot of Boomers techniques and as you can see this is this is just a single track that goes right back it holds two cars it doesn't get much simpler than that um this is a fertilizer plant in Brandon Wisconsin right down the road from where Andy lives and I really just like the way this is all laid out so this whole facility is kind of I'm some I'm freelancing the facility but it's going to be Loosely based off of off of this um so you can see they use uh augers and it just the augers just go and dump the stuff right into the building there isn't the fancy set of stuff up here on the top that that guides things from one place to another that's all internal here so uh I'm gonna model that uh and because I like these augers and I think they make a really neat a really neat detail on a layout like I say simple is sometimes the easiest way to go and this is kind of a this is uh a real generic um uh rendition of this so this is this is actually going to get extended to this from this point to the right from from right here to it's basically right to to the right of this is going to get extended and earned 19 inches so this will be down a little bit but it will only hold one car when I even when I get done with it I I my trains will only be four cars long at the max because that's all the more I can hold on my sidings then that same track this is the the feed portion of it or the grain elevator portion of it and that's going to be very very similar you can see that you have the loadout uh here a big giant grain bins uh single track and mine's going to be a little bit more extravagant than that um I may hold two cars here I haven't decided on that it's going to hold one or two cars I did just buy in St Louis a brand new elevator leg so this elevator leg will actually potentially become part of the fertilizer plant but I haven't decided on that yet I'm still kind of putzing around with stuff the engine facility this is this is some place that I've always wanted to take pictures of and the only reason I never did is because I was working and it was a treacherous I should have taken a picture of the entire Hill I want to say this is a 3.2 percent grade coming down this is that Niagara this is in Niagara yeah it's pretty it's almost four yeah it's almost a four percent grade coming down it's very short the the grade is only maybe about 15 cars long maybe 20 at the most but you are almost going straight down and at the very end of this the Chicago Northwestern had this little engine facility here and obviously there's things that aren't here uh but but this is what's left of it and so I'm going to model my engine facility kind of loosely off of what the one in Niagara was and it's just a couple of little you know phone box with uh with a pole with phone box on it a shed and then that's like a chemical Locker type of deal and this is going to be it's just gonna go right here on that track and I'll figure out where I'm going to put what later when it gets time to figuring that part out I just needed the reference photos in order to uh sort that part out this track right here I forgot to show this track right here is the single track that goes back to the co-op and the gr and the feed mill so in order to make the switch on the box cars you can do that right here but if there's a car here at spot two you're not going to be able to you got to go all the way back to the other end of the siding and we used to have to do garbage like that all the time on the real railroad so it is very prototypical uh the bridge is gonna be I just went and took some new pictures of a bridge that I'm uh with my drone uh today that is uh much much better than the one that I showed right here but it gives the same general idea it's just gonna be uh wood bents and wood and a wood deck Bridge that's all it's going to be to go over the joy River this is the span that I have I do already have these lines are every 14 feet which is about what the uh what what the bent distance between the bents is supposed to be then my gravel Loadout is uh is right here this is where I'm gonna do my gravel Loadout it's just and I just bought myself a uh a Caterpillar loader for this um and it's even though it's 150th scale it really does not look out of place so it uh it's gonna be really kind of a neat little operation uh sand is going to be also loaded and it's going to be very similar to the way it's being shown and done right here two Bay covered Hoppers here on the right and I believe this is just crane loading right here obviously but that's the way my Stone and sand is going to be this is the way that looks so I'll have some an elevated area here for the loader to be on so it can dump Into The Hoppers and then you'll have one car or one or two or however many you end up with here and you end up having to switch this now if you notice there's there's ties back here because at one point this did go back that way I actually cut it off because the way this goes in towards the bridge I thought boy this kind of looks like it used to be a siding so that's the way that's going to be modeled that the old switch with a with a with the the end of the siding but with all doesn't get service but by the One Direction anymore and so that's going to be that and then every railroad has an end I don't care where you are every single railroad whether you're a class one whether you're a short line whether you're a Last Mile Railroad you have a physical end of track someplace and uh like in Manitowoc where I work we go down we can only go so far in either direction the track physically ends at those locations you go down to the Lakeshore the track physically ends right there so it's it I created my interchange so that way on this switch right here I can get one engine I can get a gp38-2 past this or in a gp35 so I got it can get a bigger engine on the layout if I need to but uh I created myself a little I just made a little red board right there so that's uh and a dirt pile that's because I've seen pictures like this and of the end of railroads and that's what it was it was a dirt pile with a red board at the end yeah there's no you know and there is no extending the railroad through the wall I was asked that several times and I don't want that I wanted a end of the line interchange and this is the two tracks that are just basically the main line and a run around these two one of these will hold about four of the four cars and then this interchange track right here that goes into the Wisconsin Midwestern which this is a dummy track it's just kind of glued in place uh this is uh it doesn't even have power to it this is uh this track right here will hold four cars yeah my power there's my switch engine um I got it from the Norfolk Southern at one point it was an old Norfolk weather western unit they numbered at 800. you can see the influence of the Dakota rail where I just patched out the one spot um and I I came up with ghost lettering that I created my own ghost lettering uh does it's not really that good but it's noticeable it's nice uh but then I this is actually an all-scale guy that a friend of mine Chris holschbach gave me and so I'm like I like kind of set the scene like looking like that's supposed to be me even though I'm not blonde I'm like looking at the engine going well what are we gonna do with this thing and we came up with a new I came up with a new paint scheme to kind of bring it into the 90s a little bit and this is my my railroads my soul locomotives paint scheme uh this is my it does have a beacon yes and no ditch yeah it's got a beacon and no ditch lights uh and then this is the uh rough that well I shouldn't say rough this is the uh uh for the uh Farland terminals per diem era box cars I was gonna put my logo on a plate but then I realized after going to work a couple of times believe it or not this is where my job actually came into play with my modeling I was looking at the way the Box cord car doors slid and I'm like okay there's no way that a plate would have fit right there I'm gonna have to do something else and so I decided to just forego the plate and the logo is just quote unquote painted onto the car so it's stenciled onto the car and the first 50 cars 9400 to 94 or 49 have a green door with a Herald then they ordered another 50 cars after that and because they're in a time crunch to get the cars they said the heck with it and they had those cars just have reporting marks on it they just said a Tandoor and no Herald on the second set so I'm gonna have a mashup of both of those kind of sets of cars on my layout at one point and then I've got my Facebook group Berlin terminal uh Facebook group and uh I post all sorts of garbage on there uh layout stuff rail Fanning stuff all sorts of things so and that's that's my Farland terminal if anybody's got any questions shoot all right not Mike yours is in the basement correct yeah yeah mine's in the basement yep yeah oh and my whole layout's 11 and a half inches wide in s scale by the way which I I heard your background on how you got into s scale rabbit hole well yeah and the thing is is it was just one of those deals where I don't think I had a choice you know things weren't going good for a little while there and now I'm at the point where it's just is what it is I love it you know excellent who wants to give away a car yay uh yay I'll do it you guys want to do it all right let's get the the suction crew if you guys have questions out there make sure that you guys are asking them uh to the panel here uh before we uh give away this car um so tonight we're going to be giving away a home shops um hashtag not sponsored Pullman standard 4750 covered Hopper uh decorated up in Michigan interstate um and to enter into the drawing this evening what you guys need to put out there is hashtag freelance so let me see here I can pull up the banner for this evening freelance put that in the chat we're gonna start collecting uh comments here I'll bring that up on screen and Heath um as far as hours three through sir four through six you better stick around because there will be a test afterwards um oh good so we'll do hashtag freelance I'll put that up on the screen let's get some um entries in here for the HO scale no shops no I have not given up on no I did not give up on sergeants that's what I'm using uh I have cars with Katie couplers on it I'm just using As placeholders for what I'm gonna do with stuff the cars we saw on KDs have not been converted over to sergeants yet and I actually I'm using um inventive models uh right now I'm using a lot more met the models uh couplers uh so no I Sergeant couplers are the standard on the Farland terminal yeah a question um so Humanity Junction says uh capital F lowercase f does it matter it does I have the on the screen here a hashtag freelance um law lowercase make sure you're putting in lower case no capitals um here we go so right now we are up to 31 entries on here everyone there Chris put one in there our uh yeah I was gonna say participants uh able to do that or not yeah in scalar wanting eggshell swag yeah sorry for the end Stealers um out there but yeah throw your name in the only people that can't win it it's either me and Mike oh come on sorry Mike you're up right in the middle of putting in for I just wanted to say I never win nothing yeah you never win anything and I do apologize for the audio issues I don't know I don't know how we bungled that up on my end but what's that my audio this evening sounds like it sounds like Mike you like how he said we I do yeah the mouse in my pocket how do we get a boxcar for a Farland terminal Boxcar for our layout well stay tuned so tell us again yeah they're all at scale though hey that's okay okay with it I a little later one of these shows in the upcoming future there will be a reveal of some sort maybe possible oh decals decals decals decals that's the Canadian version that a boy who did my decals yeah uh who did do my decals I want to say I want to say circus city did them I was thinking yeah okay all right reminder here if you guys want to win the the tangent Box Car put in uh hashtag freelance as you see it on the screen here we're up to looks like oh 35 entries here so get them in here get them in just a bit of a plug for home shops I I gotta say I am thrilled that there's somebody out there doing this for the freelance Community I've got a seaboard Central car now and a Washington Northern car which Washington I got the magazine open right here it's one of the one of the layouts that really uh inspired me to sort of uh you know continue down this road to freelance because yeah and and then to have a car that quality with the print printing on it of that quality and have it you know sit right alongside the the prototype cars on my layout and look just as good as really fantastic yeah it's it's good it's a it's a fantastic uh company I have a lot of the covered Hoppers I got all the box cars you can see them behind me lined up here um so real happy with with home shop so I think let's see let's check in again here on the giveaway tool we got 36 entries I think it's time to uh make a drawing here and we'll get everyone out of here so there we go yeah Chris has got one as well he's got a golf Ship Island that looks really good I got them I got v o as well oh do you yep all right so we're gonna share this everyone should be able to see this on screen here for hashtag freelance I'm gonna go through and do the drawing right now here we go hang on to your butts [Music] is the winner of the home shops Michigan interstate 4750 covered Hopper congratulations Paul Paul I believe was a guest on the show at one point um fantastic weathering Clinic that he put on for us so well done Paul do you want to thank everyone uh let's see here Paul send me a DM afterwards with your address on where I can mail that car out to and I'll get that out in the post right away so any uh I guess uh before we adjourn for the evening here I do want to just uh go around the horn here and get last uh comments thoughts about freelance uh from our panel here we'll start with uh Chris in the upper in the top uh right Chris um on your freelance Journey um what do you think of of doing this as opposed to prototype railroading and model railroading and which one's harder which one do you think would be harder to do I think freelance is harder because you have to use your own creativity um but you could use as many resources as you want um I mean you can get as close to prototype or you can just do like a Gore undefeated and just you know do be Whimsical or you know however you want there's you know you can there's a big there's a wide range you can do um but it's a lot of your own creativity you know using history revisionist history um you know how you come up with your your logo and you know it's I mean it's I think it's you know it's you know like there's there's different styles of people who are you know more literary or more I mean like mechanical you know and it's I think just me being more mechanical it's it's another way of me you know being more creative yeah that's awesome what about uh Matt what do you think prototype or freelance which is harder and [Music] I think it I think it really depends on uh how realistic you're wanting your or maybe even believable is a better word you're wanting your layout to be I think the closer you get to the goal of realism the more difficult freelance becomes because uh so much more of of that gets put on your shoulders to to bring that realism to um the layout to the you know to what you're looking to model there um I think what's really fantastic about everyone around this table here is we've all taken inspiration from a prototype into our freelance world and I know sometimes you know it's the Prototype modelers we'll take a look at his freelance guys and be like ah you know you're just doing your railroad of Lies but I I hopefully tonight we've kind of shown that there's quite a bit of thought that goes into this kind of thing and there's quite a bit of even though we're doing freelance stuff you know you prototype guys we're still we're still learning from you know we're still looking at what you're doing and bring it into our world as well um so yeah for for me freelance is the way to go I think it adds just that extra layer to the Hobby on top of everything else to make it fun and interesting and even even that much more creative and uh and uh yeah so awesome what about you Chris um Chris Bell any uh feelings on on the the Prototype versus freelance and and um in your journey right so I I did I almost did the Prototype route with that uh Des Moines Union and uh found out yeah so it's it's hard uh Ray or not said you know oh you just slap a name on it and you call it a freelance Railroad and it's it's more difficult than that I mean there's more to it more thought to it so you have and then prototype you have that brand um loyalty that you have to consider you know so there's a difficulty to both sides but I think freelance is harder because you have to yeah you can pick and choose you can be I can have a up but I want BN uh style equipment on it instead or uh you know I want to have a up but I want it to run out east you know that's that's a harder sell and I think it's harder to pick out that and and he said it best you know is it prototype layout versus prototype operations which adds another layer to your whole uh freelancing things and so I think freelance is hearty because yeah I'm I'm like Mike after listening to your uh around the layout podcast I I am your you're my spirit animal I am oh no oh no oh yeah I love the pressure the pressure I have now what happens oh man what happens during freelance week stays in the second section that's for sure yeah we're calling out spirit animal I mean you saw all the crazy logos I came up with oh yeah it's there you know and uh that isn't even the half of it I mean timetables switch lists um warrant cards I I've done it all yeah and at one point and that's the hard thing too is is knowing what a real railroad does because when I started out everybody I mean Model Railroader had this thing everybody had those Union switch and Signal uh Lords yeah and I'm like oh I gotta have one of those and then I'm like well how does that fit on a small railroad it only goes four miles that's you know the Des Moines Union was only four miles long do I need a union switch and Signal uh board I'd like to have one but um yeah so yeah I I think I think freelance is actually harder than what those prototype guys would have you believe and I'll leave it there white words right there shots [Laughter] for a rebuttal um and then Clark will pass the microphone over to you no you guys have answered I think as as much I I think it's just going to be up to the individual modular um really what where their interest is and to tell somebody yo you know this is harder that I don't know again I strapped the two by four on my rear end and don't fall into those holes um but uh yeah it's uh it's been a fun evening you guys and I appreciate you having me on um there was a couple people asked a question and I was just kind of going back about uh uh am I still doing the nmra thing uh yeah I still do the um teaching of the of the Hands-On clinics and there was another oh how do I clean the the stadium yeah when when I designed this uh can I go to presentation um when I design this uh uh staging thing I designed it and again you have to think about all this [Music] um and so this is the bottom section of the layout and you'll see these these areas and all along the back that's all open now when you look into the layout this is actually got a um a floor in it that's painted green that's why you'll see when you look into it it looks so deep and you you it looks dark but I can actually just lift those out and then I can get into any of the layout all the way around oh nice and I I again I I built so many layouts and I've built for other people and I've I've been in that I know the pitfalls and I just try and stay away from the pitfalls now not every Pitfall you think of but you know um like one of the things again we were talking about Matt about you know the the Geezer gate and the swelling I use only um uh cabinet grade Plywood And this is on the bottom it was uh it was one inch and it's for pretty expensive but uh I didn't have any problems I don't have any problems with movement of the track um and I just use cork I use flooring cork flooring and then I painted all the gray and when you seal it up with the paint um it really helps with the moisture content but um I think I've got another picture where you can just it's just painting and I've got re-railers under all of those like every five feet I changed out the rail so here's here's the that's all that staging so you can get in from the front or from the back and this is only about 16 inches so and then all this is open to me at the front um let me see if I can find it here paint people so do you yeah oh sorry so um yeah so here's sort of with the top on but see how it's all open here and then I put in I put in Masonite fillers in there with um with a and I painted all this greens the same as the fascia so when you look into it you don't really see it I hope that helps people yeah that's that is helpful yeah very good um here's another lightning round question here um what's Clark what's the height of your layout uh it is uh 52 inches there you go um I I like to operate standing up and uh somebody asked me it looks like I'm I'm more of a a trained Watcher but actually I run sessions I have a jmri and uh it's all ready to go and uh I have in our area we have a Model Railroad Club uh now there's about six guys that are kind of interested in operations they're not used to it but they come over and they operate and they're getting much better at it and I just use jmri and it seems to work so yeah but we for a while there we were doing it once a month um and then uh I kind of stopped it because I was trying to get uh more scenery done so yeah yeah sure so Mike what'd you let's do the awkward what does Mike think um so pretty interesting uh Roundtable discussion this evening about freelance I think what do you think yeah I mean it's it's it what kind of the way I thought it would to be honest with you I mean there's a lot of it all not with I mean your technical difficulties oh geez you know my in my you know having to take the reins and not even knowing what's going on and I mean it was par for the course I mean it was it was all right but no it these guys of all all four of these guys have brought up and and a ton of guys in the section crew have brought up really really good points and the thing is you know Ralph Ralph made a reference that he made a point earlier far back in in the comments where it's your layout you can do whatever you want with it that's true and and you know that's that is kind of the there isn't there is no playbook for this so you can take whatever you want out of your your Inspirations or if you want if you want your layout to be a crappy little 10 Mile railroad or if you want it to be a 10 000 mile Railroad even though you're only going to model a small portion of it the bigger story tells a lot about what that small little section is going to be about right so there's you can put as much effort into this as you do prototype I actually think they are literally parallel it I really honestly do because you can go down the Prototype Road and start getting into all these different things and aspects of stuff that you never thought would have happened in order to get into your layout the only difference is is with freelancing you've got to create that yourself sure and that's it the real world does that for you with prototyping freelancing it takes a little bit of Ingenuity and a little creativity to be able to come up with something that kind of makes sense and but if it makes sense to you that's good enough you know that's all that matters you're remember you're building your layout for yourself not for anybody else first and foremost you know and and once you make yourself happy then you can worry about whether or not other people are happy so it's a good I think that's a real good um thought to leave on Prototype freelance it's all good it's all good it's all good you know at the end of the day um at the end of the day you know it's all about you know it's your hobby and and satisfying you know your your needs with it so well well said um I do have a couple administrative notes here before we tie out for tonight um we'll be back in two weeks uh with another live stream we're going to have a fellow YouTuber on is uh railfan220 his name's cam uh he's going through a bit of let's say uh a change on his layout um he's modeling modern day Burlington Northern and he's completely up ending his uh operations and he's he's agreed to come on the show to talk about it so it's going to be really cool so we'll go right into prototype uh prototype modeling right out of the freelance reminder everyone it's freelance week at the second section um so out on the Facebook group uh second section podcast make sure you guys if you want to participate in freelance week come on out there there's a bunch of people posting about the railroads uh sharing um how they come up with sharing their backstories which I think is a big part of freelancing and it's been a it's been a really fun ride and I'm posting a few of our favorites over here as well giving those folks exposure as well so make sure you join uh join the fun over at the second section podcast Facebook group and then the other the last bit of business that we do have to talk about this evening is um let's see I just want to thank everyone for sticking with us through the technical difficulties Mike you did a fantastic job uh filling in for my loud mouth um and and Chris Chris Matt and Clark I know it's a it's been a marathon slog thank you for putting all the work in for the presentations Fielding the questions and participating it was really a true it was it was fun and even though I wasn't in the Stream I could still hear what was going on so you guys did fantastic so um for for me the crew here I want to thank the section crew and we'll see you all in two weeks good night everyone thank you had a great time thanks everyone thanks here we go [Music]

Channel: Second Section Podcast

Views: 5,161

Keywords: Second Section Podcast, Model Railroading, Mascoutin Valley Railroad, Farlin Terminal, Freelance Model Railroad, Clark Kooning, NMRA, NMRA MMR, HO Scale, Model Railway, S Scale, Model Railroad Podcast

Id: GBe38r7tbf4

Length: 200min 26sec (12026 seconds)

Published: Wed Aug 09 2023