There hasn't been too much going on with the trains lately becuase of the huge rain storms and working with Andy on his science fair project. He wanted to figure out which batteries work best for his toys, so we came up with a pretty cool little experiment. At first he wanted to just put each brand of battery in a flashlight and see how long it took to go out, but that is about as exciting as watching paint dry. Instead, we took a motor, built a pulley assembly and attached a bike odometer to the pulley. It measures to the millisecond each battery's duration and strength to the hundreth of a mile. So far the results spell doom for the Kodak brand battery.

I was checking out some photos from different layouts and found mention of Carsten Lundsten, a Danish guy, living in Copenhagen but building an N scale layout based on Lamy, New Mexico. Originaly, he was going to build a layout including the Mojave desert and Cadiz. I think his layout looks great. He is an electrical engineer working on railroad signal systems, and wrote a great guide to North American Signal Sytems.