The Royce Files

I acquired an assembled version of the Lionel lumber shed structure last year and blogged about it here . It is still ridiculous how much these are going for on the market. Do not get me wrong, it is a good model, but shelling out $20 - $30 dollars for one is extravagant. It just does not have much collectible value. Since it gets attached to the Lionel name some sellers assume it is something akin to precious metal. So it is ideal to find these outside the typical Lionel searches. I would think that if the Lionel name were not attached this would be just another mass produced plastic structure. While at the October Fargo Toy and Train show I found the lumber shed in a modified form. I am not entirely sure what scale the alteration was intended- I am guessing N since most of the other items around it were for N. It certainly is a bit of a scale stretch to plausibly utilize the structure in the smaller scales. The work bench and the storage bin would have to be removed to...

It being Model Railroad Month , I should write about this interest of mine. It was only in the last two years that I have come to revisit this hobby from my past. As a child I got into model railroading with an HO train set I got for Christmas. It was a special Campbell's Soup edition set made by Life-Like. Eventually a train table was built, more track, switches, and a city load of buildings were acquired. I still own it, but it has not been run for years. It was sort of an incomplete set up. I was never any good at scenic. I just liked to run the trains. I digress. A few years ago I decided to revisit the model train hobby but this time in O scale. Which now brings us to this entry about the Granite City Train Show . Out in the Go there is very little to choose from for model railroading supplies. There is one shop that carries a bit of train stuff. There used to be another but it closed up about a decade ago. I actually attend church in one of the shop's previous loc...