Highlights of the Kanawha & Western Allegheny

What would you say are the railroad's best features? I think it gives a very good sense of the region I'm trying to model, that someone can come down here, and I've had that happen, where someone came down, looked at a scene, and was sure it was a particular town that they had been to before. I considered that to be very great success. You've captured the overall mood, right. It was not the town that he thought it was. But it had the same setup. You're an area vice president of the National Model Railroad Association. Does that take a lot of your time? It has. I've been involved with the management of the NMRA now for probably close to 10 years and it does take time, but it's also letting me meet a lot of people that might not meet otherwise, prominent modelers. It's gotten me to many more conventions I might've not gone to otherwise because of my duties. And I've always learned many, many things from these people in these conventions that I would not have learned otherwise. So in the end, it balances out. You must devote a lot of time to it. Is it more fun working with a political organization, as any organization is, then working on a layout or is it, are they both fun, or how do you approach that? I couldn't say it was more fun. It is definitely work. There are benefits that come from it, but I feel that a lot of my modeling the basis where my modeling came from that membership in the NMRA. So I felt I owed it to the organization and the hobby to put some time in and found that I got many more benefits back from this time that I had not expected. What's the most unusual feature on the layout, would you say? Probably the way I've been able to compress the ridges and mountains to get a lot of height without taking up a lot of depth. In the construction business, I was always being around construction sights, hated to see materials thrown away. And I started picking up chunks of foam that can be cut very easily with a mat knife, set in place, modified until I'm happy with the profile of it. And then by sloping gently in the foreground, increasingly steeply as it blends into the vertical hillside, I can give the appearance of a ridge in the somewhat near distance by covering the vertical face with flattened but three-dimensional trees and get a much closer, much more three-dimensional ridge than a painted background.