Big doesn’t begin to describe Tony Lash’s MTH layout
by Dick Christianson / photos by William Zuback
W
“TONY” LASH’S grandfather
brought him to the Roanoke, Va., railroad yards in the middle of the night.
Despite the hour, the 11-year-old was wide awake,
energized by the prospect of a cab ride in a mammoth Norfolk & Western Y6b steam locomotive.
As he climbed into the cab, Tony looked back
beyond the tender of the hissing 2-8-8-2 locomotive. The yard lights illuminated a seemingly endless string of empty coal hoppers, waiting to begin
the climb up the Appalachian Mountains to the
West Virginia coal mines at Bluefield.
Soon the train was deep into the mountains.
“Look out the window, lad, and tell me what
you see,” commanded the engineer. The man had
a presence about him that demanded respect, so
young Tony complied. His grandfather, the Y6b’s
fireman, made room for Tony at the cab window.
ILTON
“I don’t see anything, sir. It’s still dark,” Tony
replied to the engineer as the locomotive
pounded steadily up the grade.
Hearing the answer he expected, the engineer
then reached up and pulled the whistle cord. The
mournful sound reverberated from mountainside
to mountainside.
“Look out the window again, son, and tell me
what you see now.”
All over the mountains, lights turned on in the
homes of coal miners. The sound of the locomotive whistle served as their alarm clocks.
“The whole mountain looked like a Christmas
tree,” Tony recalls.
Is it any wonder, with memories like this, that
Tony Lash would eventually build a layout modeled after West Virginia coal mining? A layout that
climbs so high that you need a ladder to see some
of the mountaintop scenes? A layout that showcases huge steam locomotives and long coal drags?
A layout with mountainsides blanketed with trees?
Tony’s spectacular layout, built in a commercial
building that afforded him the ample space he
needed, is the culmination of dreams instilled in
him during his youth decades earlier. It’s Tony’s
version of the realistic layout many a postwar boy
imagined as his 2-6-2 with its 3-car consist raced
around the loop of track on the living room floor.
1. LEFT: An MTH Premier Y6b no. 2197, modeled after the real
locomotive Tony rode as a youth, rolls past a switchtower built by
master builder Howard Zane, one of Tony’s many hired hands.
2. RIGHT: The Y6b and an MTH Premier J-class no. 611 cross bridges
on the hills of Tony’s layout.
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JULY 2000
Of course, even the owner of such a
grand layout started much more modestly. Tony’s postwar upbringing has a
familiar ring.
A small start to big dreams
3. The modern MTH Premier diesels are the center of attention in this photo, but take a while to check
out the structures, figures, trackwork, details, and trees that contribute to the overall impact of Tony
Lash’s striking layout.
As was the case with most budding
model railroaders of the 1940s and
’50s, Tony’s toy train dreams were bigger than the family budget would allow.
Instead of the full-blown Lionel department store display layout Tony asked
for at Christmastime, he found a more
basic Lionel starter set under the tree.
But that was okay; it was a start.
As a youth, using money earned by
delivering newspapers, Tony steadily
accumulated Lionel trains. As an adult,
he has spent a lot of time and money
building an impressive collection, starting with postwar Lionel, particularly the
firm’s big O gauge locomotives and
6464 series boxcars. When Lionel
Trains Inc. produced Standard O
freight cars, Tony began buying them
and has a complete collection.
In the postwar O categories, Tony
says his collection is “about 75 percent
mint and 25 percent like new.” All of
his Standard O is mint. Tony regards
his Lionel collection as complete and
isn’t actively looking to add to it, other
than to upgrade.
When MTH Electric Trains came
along in the mid-1990s, Tony became
hooked on the detail, the quality, and
the quantity of MTH’s Premier locomotives and cars. In five years, Tony has
put together an essentially complete
collection of MTH Premier Line pieces,
including at least one of each locomotive and car that has multiple road
numbers. He has all of the cars in mint
collections (many in multiples for operation on the layout) and is missing only
about 10 locomotives (most notably the
earliest Pennsy F3 A-B-A). Actually, he
has examples of all the road names and
is missing only certain cab numbers.
Much more than a collector
4. Lehigh Valley F3 no. 510 meets Baltimore & Ohio GP9 no. 6603 at a crossing just outside Robertsdale.
Beyond the sound and motion of the locomotives, flashing signals by Memphis Signal Digitals add life to
the scene. Howard Zane scratchbuilt the crossing tower.
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CLASSIC TOY TRAINS
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JULY 2000
While Tony is without question a
train collector, if you haven’t already
noticed, he’s also a toy train operator.
His adult layout-building period
began after he returned from Vietnam,
got married, and had children. Over
the years, Tony has built a half-dozen
toy train layouts in addition to his original childhood layout.
“They weren’t anything like my current layout,” Tony acknowledged.
“They were the typical flat tabletop layouts with milk cars, cattle cars, coal
ramps, and the (switch) tower with the
guys going up and down the stairs.”
He’s even gone through the HO
phase. Sometime in the mid-1980s,
Tony became interested in Märklin, primarily because of its digital command
control system. He likes operating the
system so much he still has a large
Märklin HO layout in the basement of
his suburban Washington, D.C., home.
The lack of American prototypes has
kept him from going much farther with
the scale and brand, however.
It’s clear that technology intrigues
Tony. While he’s generally a product of
the postwar era, in mind and spirit he’s
a hi-tech kinda guy.
His original plan was to install the
Lionel TrainMaster Command Control
system on the layout. Not totally satisfied with this system and put off by its
incompatability with MTH locomotives
– his layout’s primary motive power –
Tony used his layout as a test track, trying just about every electronic gadget
and control system on the market, in
hopes of finding the right system. At
last, he’s convinced he’s found it.
Because of Tony’s personal relationship with Mike Wolf and others at
MTH, and because Tony’s layout in
Capitol Heights, Md., is not far from
MTH’s headquarters, the firm’s engineers used his extensive layout to test
and demonstrate MTH’s recently
announced digital control system.
Thus, Tony has seen the system in
action under operating conditions and
is brimming with enthusiasm. (Tony’s
layout served as background for many
of the scenes on the video MTH produced to announce the new control system.) Tony is especially pleased with
the “cruise control” feature that keeps a
train moving at constant speed on
grades – a great feature to have on a
mountain-railroading layout. And he
considers the new digital sound package a “vast improvement” over the original ProtoSounds.
A “real” big layout
Tony’s layout is enormous – even
downright overwhelming at first sight.
It may very well be the largest privately
owned three-rail O gauge layout.
The layout occupies an area just shy
of 3,000 square feet (45 by 65 feet) of
previously unused office space in
Tony’s 14,000-square-foot building. (If
you’re wondering, Tony is the owner
5. With Republic Mine gleaming in the
background at twilight, the N&W J and her
passenger consist roar through Zanesville. The
miners are finishing a hard day’s work and
probably couldn’t scratch together train fare
anyway – as Tennessee Ernie Ford used to sing,
they owe their soul to the company store!
City
10
Power
8
plant
6 Entrance
5
Control panel
Company town
9
1
Hershey’s
Coal
mine
4
14
Carnival
Cover
7
3
2
Passenger terminal (under construction)
Not to scale - overall size 45'-0" x 65'-0"
Track color for route identification only
Illustration by Robert Wegner
JULY 2000
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Helping hands
Some of the layout builders and
manufacturers gathered in front of the
control panel the day we visited to
photograph the layout.
They are (front row, left to right): Steve
Brenneisen of Ross Custom Switches, Ken
Young of Scale Model Railroads, Vernon
Peachey of Model Railroad Custom
Benchwork, Gregg Spence of Del-Aire
Products, Andy Edleman of MTH Electric
Trains, Tony Lash, Sharlain and Bob
Chapman, contract layout builders.
(Back row, left to right): John Cassel of
Scale Model Railroads, Jordan Peachey of
Model Railroad Custom Benchwork,
master builder Howard Zane, Terry
Christopher of Custom Signals, and Rich
Foster of MTH Electric Trains.
and CEO of Consolidated Waste Industries, a full-service trash removal and
paper recycling company that serves
the Washington area.)
But the layout’s impact goes well
beyond size. It’s as finely scenicked and
detailed as any scale layout you’ll see.
Apart from the blackened third rail
that runs down the middle of the
nearly one linear mile of stainless steel
GarGraves track and the 86 Ross Custom Switches (mostly nos. 4, 6, and 8),
this is a scale model railroad.
But it’s still a toy train layout, and
Tony has no desire to “remove the center rail.” He has no interest in waybills
or point-to-point operation. “I’m just a
runner,” he says without apology. He
sees the layout as a way of getting away
from the stress of life. Though the look
of the layout might suggest otherwise,
Tony is not an O scaler bent on scale
fidelity: He’s a true hi-railer who
doesn’t take either himself or his scale
tendencies too seriously.
A plan and hired hands
Tony bought the property for his
business in 1994. In the back of his
mind he had a vision of the type of
mountainous layout he wanted to
build. Coincidentally, 1994 was about
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the same time Mike Wolf began to offer
big, powerful steam locomotives capable of climbing steep grades with long
strings of coal hoppers in tow. Perhaps
this layout was simply destined to be!
Long before it all came together,
though, Tony had been track planning.
He’d closely examine the track plans in
Model Railroader magazine and set aside
ideas he liked and knew he could incorporate in his own layout someday. With
a chunk of his warehouse at his disposal, he began to fit all those ideas
into one layout.
Tony knew he wanted four mainline
loops big enough that he could run two
trains on each. He also wanted the layout to feature a general freight yard
that could hold plenty of cars, an 8- or
9-foot-long engine-service terminal, a
13-stall roundhouse with a turntable big
enough to accommodate the longest
steam engines, and a coal mine with
plenty of storage tracks. He envisioned
trains rolling through tunnels, along
rock faces, and over high bridges.
Knowing so clearly what he wanted,
Tony didn’t need much time to complete his track plan on paper. Nor did
it take him long to realize that this
wasn’t like any other layout he had ever
built and that there was no way, even
JULY 2000
with the help of son Duke, that he
would be able to build it during his lifetime. The job would simply be too big.
So, he began looking for help.
Tony again turned to the pages of
Model Railroader and found an ad from
Custom Model Railroads of nearby Baltimore. He invited owner Vernon
Peachey to take a look at his plan and
the large room.
By late 1996 Vernon and his son Jordan were at work in their shops building sections of benchwork. Then, in
mid-1997 they began delivering benchwork modules, bringing them in
through a large window that had been
removed beforehand. “When all of the
modules were in, they fit like a glove,”
says Tony. Theoretically, the layout is
sectional and could be moved to
another site at some point, “though it
would play havoc with the scenery.”
With the benchwork assembled, Vernon and Jordan put all of the roadbed
in place, laid the track and switches,
and created the enormous scratchbuilt
trestles that greet you as you enter the
layout room. When all of the track was
in place and temporarily wired, Tony
ran trains over the line and Vernon
made adjustments. Today, the trains
run smoothly and quietly around the
How big is big?
SOMETIMES RAW numbers help
define something that’s simply
too big to capture in photos.
Tony Lash’s layout:
• Occupies close to 3,000 square
feet, twice the size of the typical
starter home and larger than
the average-sized home.
• Utilizes nearly 1 mile of track
(a real mile, not a scale mile!)
incorporating 86 switches.
• Contains 7,000 trees.
• Is powered by three Z-4000
transformers, three ZW transformers, two commercial
transformers (for lighting) and
one LGB “Jumbo” transformer
(for switch machines).
• Has employed more than a
dozen helpers professionally at
various times for more than
three years.
6. Vernon Peachey built the benchwork under
Tony’s layout and kept building upward, topping
off his efforts with spectacular wooden trestles.
This spliced-photograph view of the layout, taken
at the entrance, still can’t cover the full width of
the track plan or show the detailed rear portions
of the layout.
layout, a testament to excellent benchwork and trackwork.
Power packed
Tony’s original plan was to control
the trains using Lionel’s TrainMaster
system, so he didn’t need any blocks on
the mainline loops. With that as the
case, Bill Fosbrook, a retired electrician
who had helped Tony wire a “temporary layout” some months earlier (see
sidebar on page 67), strung four loops
of 10 gauge wire under the layout, emptying four 500-foot rolls “pretty quick.”
Then he ran other colors of no. 10 wire
for eventual use with signals, building
lighting (of different intensity), switch
lamps, and other electrical needs.
Knowing that he was going to wire
the layout this way, Bill had Vernon
Peachey drop stranded no. 14 wire
about every 6 to 8 feet along the main
line. Bill actually ended up using only
every other drop, so the loops have
feeders every 12 to 14 feet. As soon as
they began running trains, it was clear
there was absolutely no voltage drop
anywhere on the layout, even at the
point farthest from the transformers.
At the control panel, Tony has three
MTH Z-4000 transformers devoted
strictly to powering the endless track.
Four handles control the mainline
loops, one handle controls trains in the
freight yard/roundhouse/diesel facility
area, and one handle controls the yard
at the coal mine. Three Lionel ZW
transformers are used as auxiliary
power elsewhere on the layout.
Because the layout features a variety
of light levels (bright streetlights as well
as dimly lighted interiors in the houses
at the coal mine’s “company town”),
Tony bought two Edwards multi-tap
commercial-grade transformers (typically used for fire alarm systems in
apartment buildings). The constant
voltage taps on these transformers are
in 4-volt increments between 4 and 24
volts. The equipment easily handles the
hundreds of light bulbs on the layout.
And then there’s the power needed
for animation, including scenes
enhanced by products from Willard’s
Animation. All over the layout things
are happening. The river at the front of
the layout appears to cascade off a cliff
by virtue of a light behind the translucent waterfall reflecting off a rotating
drum of aluminum foil. The propeller
spins on the treetop-skimming bi-plane.
Among those hard at work are track
workers welding along the right-of-way,
front-end loader operators lifting sheets
JULY 2000
of plywood in the lumberyard, a backhoe operator digging up a street, and a
city worker painting a light pole. Fireworks go off at the amusement park,
conceived and designed by Tony’s son
Duke. The park is loaded with animated rides. Many of these animated
products came with a 110-volt power
cord attached, so Bill had to run
Romex cable and install electrical boxes
under the layout according to local
electrical code.
Finally, Bill needed to supply DC
power to the electro-pneumatic valves
that control the layout’s 86 Del-Aire
switch mechanisms. For that he chose
one of LGB’s “Jumbo” transformers.
Once the main wiring was completed and trains were running, Bill’s
job routine changed. Now he had to
provide interior lighting for the dozens
of exquisite large and small structures
that began arriving from the workshops
of master builders Howard Zane, Ernie
Korber, Alan Graziano, and others. The
scratchbuilt structures (many of them
with interior detailing) are spectacular.
The interior lighting simply calls attention to them – and deservedly so.
Today, with most buildings constructed and in place on Tony’s layout,
Bill shows up once a week or so to do
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whatever troubleshooting is necessary
and, if there’s time left over, to “just sit
back and run trains.”
Blanketing the scenery
7. Big power meets in the mountain. Check out the lighted cab interior of the MTH Mallet no. 2197; the
smoke pouring out of Chesapeake & Ohio Allegheny no. 1604 is impressive too.
8. The diesel fueling facility stands directly underneath high-power lines from the power plant nearby.
Arttista figures are arranged in mini-scenes everywhere around the layout.
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Like the wiring, the subject of
scenery deserved some careful consideration, given the endless scale acres
that such a large layout covers. Naturally, Tony wasn’t adverse to hiring people with that special know-how. This
time, the help found him.
Rick Sester of Memphis Signal Digital had been doing work on Tony’s layout when he happened to meet friends
Bob and Shar Chapman at a scale
model show in Timonium, Md. The
Chapmans are early retirees who travel
the country in an RV doing contract
work on people’s train layouts. Rich
told Bob, “You really need to meet
Tony Lash, and you really need to see
his layout.”
During his visit, Bob talked to Tony
and, seeing the traditional hardshell
construction under way, told him, “You
know, Tony, that’s pretty slow going.
There’s another way you can do this.”
And that’s how the Chapmans found
themselves working three to four days a
week for the next few months.
Bob’s “other way” involves foam rib
supports and a polyurethane resin
blanket called Geodesic Foam that is
attached to those supports. The “ribs,”
made of 11⁄2-inch insulating foam cut to
the hillside’s contour with a serrated
steak knife, are attached to the benchwork with hot glue. Bob then applies
the blanket, or “skin,” over the ribs in
sheets as large as 2 by 3 feet. That’s why
the process goes so fast!
Geodesic Foam, available from Bragdon Enterprises of Georgetown, Calif.,
is created from a two-part chemical
reaction that is sandwiched between
other materials. This “sandwich” consists of bubble wrap on one side and
fiber glass screen door material and
clear plastic wrap (similar to dry-cleaning bags) on the other. While the
freshly mixed expanding foam in the
middle is still soft, Bob lays the flexible
blanket over the ribs. He staples one
edge to the benchwork, then folds back
the blanket onto the ribs, which are
covered with hot glue to permanently
adhere the supports to the blanket.
Within a half hour, the foam hardens
and the blanket becomes hard like
fiber glass. “It’s a great way to make a
lot of progress quickly on a large layout
like Tony’s,” Bob says.
Shar employed another shortcut that
covered ground quickly. First, she cut 1
by 2-foot sheets of kraft paper and laid
it on a flat surface. Then she tore thousands of thumbnail-sized pieces of
Woodland Scenics coarse foam clusters
(in three shades of green) and hotglued the pieces to the paper. Finally,
Bob hot-glued these foliage sheets to
the hardened Geodesic Foam base.
The technique is great for vertical
surfaces, of which there are many on
Tony’s layout, because it’s almost
impossible to get foliage to cling to vertical faces. One drawback: “It’s quite
expensive,” Bob acknowledged, “but
Tony didn’t have a problem with that.
What’s important is that it worked!”
Everywhere, rocks and trees
If any naturally oriented scenery
materials stand most prominently on
Tony’s layout, it has to be the mountain
rocks and trees. These elements deserve
special attention.
For the many rock faces in the
mountainous areas of the layout, Bob
borrowed rubber rock molds from
structure builder Howard Zane and
poured a clear resin into them. Each
resulting casting is very thin – only
about 1⁄8-inch thick – and remains flexible while it’s still warm. Before each
casting hardened, Bob hot glued it in
place along one edge, then bent and
shaped it to match the contour of the
surface beneath it – even around
curves. Then he hot-glued the other
edges in place. When the casting set
about a half-hour later, it became a
hard piece of plastic.
While the process is certainly an
easy, ideal way to do rocks, there is a
drawback: Paint will not adhere directly
to the slippery resin surface. So one
extra step is necessary. Like an artistic
painter prepping a canvas, Bob had to
apply artist’s gesso (available, naturally,
at art supply stores) to make the surface
more friendly to paint.
Bob’s paint of choice is powdered
tempera in appropriate colors. On
Tony’s layout, he brushed it onto the
rock surface, which by virtue of the
gesso, held the pigment. Then he
lightly misted it with water and gently
spread the paint with a soft brush.
JULY 2000
When that had dried, Bob drybrushed
the rock surfaces with white to bring
out the contours and crevices. The
painting process took some time, but
with excellent results.
And then there are the trees – more
than 7,000 of them.
The majority of the primary, frontof-the-layout variety trees are from kits
made by Jane’s Trains and assembled
by Bob’s daughter, Debra Barnhart,
and Rick Sester’s wife, Camille. The
kits, commercially available under the
9. Here’s the motive power lineup (from left to
right, MTH unless otherwise indicated): WVP&P Co.
Shay no. 12; NYC J-1e Hudson 4-6-4 no. 5344;
Southern Ry. Crescent Pacific 4-6-2 Ps-4 no. 1396;
N&W J no. 611; Lionel Hudson no. 5344; Southern
Pacific 4-8-4 Daylight no. 4449; Empire State
Express Hudson no. 5429; SP Cab-Forward AC-6 48-8-2 no. 4126; CNJ Blue Comet Pacific no. 833; UP
Challenger 4-6-6-4 no. 3982; N&W Y6b Mallet 2-88-2 no. 2197; DM&IR Yellowstone 2-8-8-4 no. 227;
and, dwarfed by its neighbors, N&W 0-8-0 no. 244
(Rail King). On the turntable, earning its name is
the Big Boy, UP 4-8-8-4 no. 4012.
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product name “Forest in a Flash,” each
yield three or four trees and come in a
variety of colors. Naturally, the assembly
of these trees took time, but when
installed on the layout, they looked
great. The women also built hundreds
of Woodland Scenics trees of all sorts.
As the assembled trees showed up at
the layout, Bob applied a little glue to
the base of the trunks and inserted
each one into the foam blankets – by
the thousands.
One nice touch Bob has added may
not be apparent until it’s brought to
your attention. He planted lots of
orange and yellow trees at the higher
elevations, suggesting an early fall in
the mountains. Any Train Collectors
Association member who has driven
west through the Appalachians on the
return trip from the October York meet
knows that’s the way it looks.
People and other pieces
With the scenery and trees in place,
all of the figures, vehicles, signs, and
other details entered the scene.
Tony credits long-time friend John
Cassel (he built Tony’s HO scale
Märklin layout) with most of the detail
work. He designed and completed the
numerous mini-scenes on the layout; he
positioned the several thousand dollars’
worth of Arttista figures in just the right
places; and he beautifully ballasted several scale miles of track.
Tony is effusive in praise of John’s
efforts. “He was the one with the vision.
He designed the cities, the placement
of roads, streets, and details. He made
the layout come to life,” says Tony.
Finally, the last bit of trackside detail
had to be accounted for. The intricate,
brass, operating O scale trackside signals (accurate for the N&W) and crossing gates were built by Terry Christopher of Custom Signals, Poughkeepsie,
N.Y. Rick Sester, from Memphis Digital
Signal, comes to the scale show at Timonium, Md., three times a year, and
during those visits Rick stops in at
Tony’s to install computer chips and
circuitry for the signals and gates.
According to Tony, Rick deserves a lot
of credit because “it’s a long, hard,
tedious job.” And there’s still work to
be done.
10. What’s that Union Pacific DD40AX doing here?
Pretend it was making a PR visit out East.
Likewise, the locomotive’s engineer is probably
wondering what that low-flying, dive-bombing
bi-plane is doing. Crop dusting? Whatever the
rationale, the elements make for an interesting,
colorful scene. The spinning propeller is just one of
dozens of animations on Tony’s layout.
You call this temporary?
IMAGINE A LAYOUT consisting of
dozens of sheets of plywood, three
months of electrical work, and a
maze of track to keep a fleet of
locomotives hard at work. To most,
that’d be a dream layout. To Tony,
it was a short nap.
During the period CMR was at
work on his permanent layout’s
benchwork, Tony became impatient. After all, there he was with all
that space and lots of trains, but
nowhere to run them. What to do?
Why not build a “temporary” layout
in the meantime?
So he called the lumberyard and
had workers deliver 48 sheets of 4
by 8 plywood. In no time he had
built a huge flattop layout using
Lionel tubular track. It was enough
to keep Tony going until the real
layout arrived.
While that layout’s longevity
promised to be brief, it wasn’t
exactly a shoddy, makeshift project.
Consider the efforts of one man
who made it work.
At one point, the temporary layout came up with a dead short that
Tony couldn’t track down, so looking for help he called his friendly
hobby shop in Washington, D.C. In
turn, the hobby shop’s owner put
Tony in touch with one of its regular customers, Bill Fosbrook, a
retired electrician.
“I’ve got a temporary layout
that’s got a short. If you’d come
over I’d really appreciate it,” Tony
said. Bill didn’t see any harm in visiting and was glad to help out, so he
packed up his tools and drove to
Capitol Heights to see what he
could do. It didn’t take him long to
find the all-too-common culprit: a
faulty section of track (dogged by a
As you look at the layout, it appears
to be pretty much complete. Tony and
his crew have created a masterpiece in
O. The vegetation is thick, the structures are lighted, there are figures
everywhere, and the layout runs like a
clock. But as we all know, no layout is
ever complete. And that’s true of
Tony’s, though he says “it’s about 97
percent complete right now.”
Here are some things to watch for.
The passenger yard has track and ballast, but it’s lacking the massive terminal Tony envisions, complete with interior detail and lighting and hundreds
JULY 2000
paper insulator with a hole in it,
allowing the metal ties and track to
make contact).
With the problem solved, the two
spent a little time chatting. Tony
described to Bill what he had in
mind for the short-term layout –
some additional sidings, some
uncoupling tracks, operating accessories – and asked if Bill would be
interested in helping him. That was
While CMR was at work on his
permanent layout, Tony
became impatient. So he had
48 sheets of 4 by 8 plywood
delivered. In no time he had
built a huge flattop layout.
in January 1997. Bill spent the nextthree months wiring Tony’s “temporary” layout.
A couple months later, Bill came
into the same hobby shop while the
owner was talking to Tony on the
telephone about a new locomotive
that had just arrived. Bill took the
phone and told Tony he’d be glad
to drop it off for him. Tony was
glad to get the offer and said,
“Good, I was going to call you to
come over and look at something
anyway.” When Bill got there, the
“temporary” layout was gone and
much of the benchwork for the new
layout was in place. Bill took over
the wiring at that point and has
showed up for work at least once a
week since mid-1997.
of people departing and arriving. Tony
also looks forward to installing the
MTH digital command control system.
And who knows what enhancements
that will bring? And then there are
more details and rust on the rails,
maybe some passing sidings wherever
possible, and the completion of the signal system.
Finally – though Tony is noncommittal, calling it “kind of a pipe-dream
right now” – rumors are circulating
among the help that plans are in the
works for expansion into the adjacent
office area. We’ll keep you posted. T
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