With our latest yard improvements we were finally able to hang our plaque we had made up at this years ECLSTS
Great looking Plaque Vinny, Hope it doesn’t warp in the sun or rain.
Ron Tremblay said:
Great looking Plaque Vinny, Hope it doesn’t warp in the sun or rain.
Hopefully it holds up, I put a coat of spar urethane on it (same stuff I used on my bridge) so that should keep it in good condition for a while.
He’s made up a few for me:
With the 2015 season winding down we had some funds (aka. cash) available to replace the portion of fence that separated our house from the now abandoned house behind us, and add a new section of fence with a gate to totally seal off our back yard.
Here is some pic’s of the old fencing:
The new fencing is being installed on steel poles, so once the old sections were removed the new poles went in:
The new steel poles had to set up for a few days and then the fence contractor came back to install the new fencing & gate.
And as I posted earlier, we were able to finally hang up our plaque!
After the track was reinstalled by the fence it was time to run some trains!
After visiting Shawn Viggiano’s railway recently we already are planning some changes to our railway for next spring (2016)
Nice way to contain the expansion (http://largescalecentral.com/externals/tinymce/plugins/emoticons/img/smiley-cool.gif)
Dave Marconi said:
Nice way to contain the expansion (http://largescalecentral.com/externals/tinymce/plugins/emoticons/img/smiley-cool.gif)
While we do still have a nice little area we could expand into I honestly don’t know if I want to.
We spent enough time all season long just taking care of our 200’ of track and all of the plants & weeds!, I certainly would like to do it, but we have more then enough to keep us busy as it is for now.
It’s looking good just the size it is
Looking good Vinny. You and Penny have done a wonderful job. 
Update Spring of 2016 (4/17/16)
While we had a very mild winter here in New England our railway didn’t fair to well.
Late fall of 2015 we had a couple of different weeds that started to appear and while we still continued to weed the railway until it was to cold outside the weeds just took over during the winter!
Every where on the layout that had mulch (almost all of it including our walk way area) ended up getting covered with these thick long rooted weeds that just seemed to thrive during the cold winter months… wish our front lawn would have grown in as thick as these weeds did!
So we decided it was time to try something new! We still removed ALL of the weeds which took almost 2-weeks and a few trips do the dump to discard them all.
The new plan was to put crushed rock down in all the walking area around the layout, so 2-1/2 yards of 3/8" crushed blue stone gave us these results:
So with the walk way area taken care of we moved on to weeding the layout and getting all of our buildings back out and in place:
We just need to get our bridges back in place, do some minor track maintenance and we will be running trains again!
A railroad is a never ending project! (http://largescalecentral.com/externals/tinymce/plugins/emoticons/img/smiley-undecided.gif)
Looks good, Vinny!..(http://www.largescalecentral.com/externals/tinymce/plugins/emoticons/img/smiley-wink.gif)
Looks great Vinny. Marilyn wants the Fire Pit and I really like the low deck. I’ve been moving a lot of stone lately too!
Daktah John said:
Looks great Vinny. Marilyn wants the Fire Pit and I really like the low deck. I’ve been moving a lot of stone lately too!
Thanks John, I forgot to add Penny also stained the deck yesterday morning also!
I really wish I had that deck surfaced in Trex decking like our other deck, it just takes a beating in the sun.
Early fall update!
The crushed stone we put down in the spring worked out well, our weeding chores were kept to a minimum. That really helped as we spent almost all summer enjoying our new camper and spent very little time working on the railway.
But the last few weekends were spent cleaning it up, trimming all the trees and making sure everything worked as it was supposed to.
We did replace our reverse control this spring with a LGB unit and after I cooked the original from wiring it incorrectly LGB still took it back and shipped me a new one. I really like how it operates, much smoother start / stop than my old Aristo reverse control I was using.
Anyway, we have been running trains enjoying the nice cool weather that has settled in!
Vincent, the plantings and landscaping looks great. Your weed battle worked! What are the screens over the ponds for?