Been very busy building a few structures. Just finished Curry's Merchantile from Bar Mils of course. I really do like his kits. The town is now finished. No more room for anything. Next will be the road planning and such. But first I will build that Stoney Creek boiler and shed for the John Allen engine house. Hey, it needs some source of power! I also did a lot of weathering on the cast resin junk piles from Rusty Rails that are now sitting in the salvage yard which is surrounded by wooden fencing. I have on order a CAT material handler to go in the bone yard too. Have to have some way of loading the scrap into the waiting gondolas.....right? Maybe I'll get the urge to take some pictures some day. Still no trees planted, but all the track is laid and has been test run many times. Progress is slow when you are a one man band.
While I was working on the Hay Street station drawing (that needed a bunch of changes as I studied the photos more, big surprise). I got off on a tangent looking at my Narrows Park project as I have figured out how to put Google earth to use more, also using some historic maps as an overlay in Google Earth to trace back details that are long gone. The latest view of Narrows Park. The green line is the park boundary, and brown lines are buildings, all from a 1921 Sanborn map. I grabbed contour lines (redish brown) from a convenient USGS map. The pale green rectangle would be the space taken up by a small T gauge track oval in N Scale, if I were to use some T Scale stuff to build a train ride for the park.
Well, back to the Hay Street station.
All the best,
Charles
Nice work Charles. You sure have mastered the google stuff. Way beyond any of my capabilities on the computer. I still can't get sketch-up to work for me. I'll stick to building and bashing kits.
I had a bought program that worked up to Win7, but does not support the newer versions. I even used it to inventory our extensive book collection. I think it was actually a DOS based program. I have looked at some of the programs out there now and am not convinced they are as simple to use as they appear. The most popular program seems to be Decoder Pro which not only keeps track of your inventory, but also allows you to build a data base for your locos. Does not cover non-decoder products like cars and structures though. I tired to build a spread sheet for myself but am not conversant in computer geek enough to be able to make it work. Maybe I can get my accountant wife to come out of retirement and develop one for me. I probably should check out the old program and see if he had updated it for Win10.
So to answer your question.......yes I have used an inventory program and found it handy when it came time to sell off older equipment. Also can be used to buy an insurance policy to cover your train "collection".
Found a couple of little bugs in the Train Pro system that can be overcome easily. I have been in contact with the company and they are working on an updated program. However, it still works very well as is.
