It’s been embarrassingly long since I last posted on this blog. The reason? Well, our family started to grow again, and I had to find space for a queen size bed in what used to be called the train room. Needless to say, this entailed a huge disruption to train construction. The train desk used to take up a whole wall of the basement; now, however, all the bookshelves that were along another wall have had to move under the layout to make room for a murphy bed. So the train desk had to move again, and has shrunk from 14′ long to about 6′, including photo studio. You can see the new compact version here.

I’ve had to collapse the photo studio into the middle drawer, and the photo floods have moved into storage (will they ever reappear?). I’m now shooting all digital, including for print, and the daylight compact fluorescents give very good colour reproduction.

I also had to become much more efficient about drawer space. I lost one of those crappy plastic sets of drawers on casters. Good riddance, really. All the tools that were in there have found new homes either in the red tool chest or in the desk drawers. Some tools, like the Dremel, have moved out of drawers altogether, and may even get used from time to time now.

One of the bigger jobs was organizing all the pieces of material that I had squirreled away in boxes. For years, I’ve kept bags of styrene strip stapled to pieces of card in a Famous Grouse Whiskey box. Unfortunately, I never knew what to do with all the pieces of brass wire, strip, tube and such that doesn’t come in bags. Finally, I devised a way to create pockets, and sorted through them all. That was a long and somewhat surprising process; I discovered that I have loads of 3/32″ brass rod, but barely any 1/16″, for example. Finding out what you have is one of the many benefits of getting organized.

I imagine I’ll be shifting things around for a while yet, but at least I can now see the top of the desk again, and could probably put my hands on almost anything in a few minutes of head scratching and a few more minutes of digging. Hopefully the model updates flow a bit better from now on.