Railroading in the Wild West

I recently got the book 'Railroading in the Wild West'.  It is written by John Vaughan, from the UK. It has been out now for a while. It is not often that you find a non US author writing a book about US railroads.
That said, this book is not so much to read, but to look at. It's 196 pages contain over 200 photo's, and it can therefore best be described as a photo album, and each photo has interesting captions. It shows of the way US railroading was from the what I call 'second transition era'in the 1980's up until the late 90's early 2000's, where many large railroads were heavily investing in new generation diesels, and a lot of mergers were on the cards or happening. This, all set in the dramatic scenery of the western USA and Canada.
There are some fantastic pictures, that make for great 'arm chair rail fanning', and the scenery is sometimes breath taking, and should provide ample inspiration for model railroaders. If I had any comments, I would have hoped the book to be using larger page sizes, and would have shown a little more Southern Pacific content. Many photographs show Union Pacific or Santa Fe/BNSF in action. Nonetheless, I recommend you get this.
Do shop around, I bought mine for less than £15,- new from Amazon, but there are also copies that sell for over £40,- which I believe is too much.

Sometimes I don't like this hobby

Particularly if manufacturers start to send me messages that they're announcing this that or the other, and the items they offer are all things I'd like to have.
Case in point is Athearn's latest newsletter, announcing Southern Pacific GP9R locomotives, in their Genesis range. If the recent (2nd release) GP9's are anything to go by these should be beautiful, however they seem to be shipping very close to the release date of the GP38-2, of which I ordered two. I can't afford it all, so I will have to let these GP9R's slip for now, hoping for a future release.
Another reason why I don't like it is that I've got two GP9's by Proto 2000, for which I've purchased additional detail parts, and am about to go and strip those and turn them into SP GP9R's in the next few months..... Looks like Athearn will be shipping theirs even before I've got mine done...

Sometimes, I don't like this hobby.    ;-)

Exeter modular meet

Oh dear, it's nearly mid March and I haven't posted a single thing yet... sorry! Here goes, a while back I reported on building a few modules according to the new NMRA-BR standards. Mine are not ready yet (far from actually), but some of my fellow NMRA-BR members have , and recently a modular meet in Exeter UK was held, partly to test the new modules build by various members, and have some fun operating. The below video , made by Mike Ruby, shows the results.  There's a longer version available of the same meet, with more switching action.  Enjoy!