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With the completion of the Surroundings Interiors warehouse, I can finally get to work on one of the biggest visual concerns on The Hills Line, the Hill Track. On the prototype, the Hill Track connects the Iowa Interstate's yard in Iowa City with the Maiden Lane interchange on the industrial spur. On the layout, it … Continue reading Now You See It…
There's no such thing as the perfect layout space, and our basement proves that as fact time and time again. Over the lifetime of The Hills Line, as well as other layouts I've built in that space, I've made what I feel are significant compromises to make a model railroad fit in our lower level. … Continue reading Cornering
As I've previously mentioned, a majority of the structures on The Hills Line are not rail served. Including them on the layout remains necessary, since they're essential to setting both era and locale for the layout. The goal then becomes developing methods to construct these buildings in a way that's both efficient and effective. For … Continue reading Surroundings Interiors
“You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.” -Buckminster Fuller- Every so often a technique comes along that so fundamentally changes my processes to such a degree that I end up exclaiming... Where was that all my life?!? I'm not the … Continue reading Evolving
The Hills Line 