2005-08 Thrashing From Donboy The race to the finish has started in earnest. This week the digging will start on the new addition to the house. I am doing some of the work myself and just got done removing the old deck that was in the way. Being frugal I salvaged the lumber from the deck to use for my railroad benchwork. The yard and the house will be a mess for a while. At some point the kitchen will be totally gutted. My better half will be pushing the project along to completion and I will not have even one day of spare time in the months ahead.  I will be doing a major happy dance when it is all done. With the changes in the layout of the basement I have been revisiting my layout design ideas. I am having a hard time dealing with the short distance we have to accept between towns on a model layout. In O scale it is hard to have even one scale mile between towns and the more I think about it the more it bothers me. I think the ideal distance would be about 10 miles between towns (that would be about 1200 feet of main line in O scale!). I don't know how I will deal with this in the end. I have been looking at doing a model of just one town or using a computer simulation program to host the main line runs. In any case I will have a few more months to think about main line length before I can start my benchwork