 The What's Neat Show is sponsored by Lombard Hobbies, your value hobby shop for over 40 years of modelers helping modelers. Big inventory, value pricing, fast shipping, and great service. And by Bachman Trains. Now that's the way to run a railroad. Check out their website at bachmentrains.com. And by Roka prototype models. We make it real. Check out their website at www.rokamodels.com. And thank you for helping us support the best hobby in the world. This is What's Neat for January 2023. I'm your host Ken Patterson. And this month we've got a good show in that we build a switch yard diorama primarily designed for outdoor photography with regular trackage in code 70 on one half and a cement apron on the other in order to load freight cars and share auto racks and other types of railroad equipment that you would see photographed on a tarmac of cement. In this video we also share with these brand new models from Roka prototype models. These are Safe Pack auto racks and they're absolutely amazing models. Also this month Larry Harrington from Bachman Industries shared with us a lot of the new products that they're coming out with for this new year including those amazing dash nine locomotives in 129 scale. They're absolutely beautiful. Also this month be sure to check out if you haven't already seen it the What's Neat This Week video podcast that we shoot every Saturday night down here in the studio with our crew of podcasters plus special guests a lot of new announcements and new products every week on What's Neat This Week and model rariting on YouTube. So with that let's continue on with the rest of this January 2023 What's Neat. Hello this is Michael Gross and you're watching What's Neat with Ken Patterson. For this segment of What's Neat we're gonna build a photographic diorama for shooting models outside. This is one that I can use over and over for a multitude of models. Now I presently have a diorama that I had built some time back for atherin trains. I wanna guess this diorama is good better than six or seven years old and this was part of a double piece diorama. It used to be eight feet long and it was a scene that we built to replicate an exact switch yard. Well as time has gone by this has been stored out in my garage over the years and the humidity and the moisture in the air and the drying of the air and the heat and the temperature has slowly caused the ballast and in this case this is ground up walnut shell ballast from Woodland Scenics which is standard what I like to use all the time for scenes and I'll probably use this ballast again or maybe mix some real rock into it or maybe simply use dirt and color the diorama by painting all of the track to give it that look that I want. The diorama itself is just gonna be a base for shooting freight cars which is something that's very important that I have to do from time to time for the podcast show or maybe the occasional advertiser that would like to have their freight cars look amazing in outdoor sunlight. So also another thing that has happened on this diorama over time and it's just simple wear and tear is the track has come loose from some of the spikes on various parts of it on ends just various areas of the diorama are not doing so well when it comes to being in great photographic condition for a diorama. So what I'm gonna do is I've got a piece of foam underneath it. I'm gonna cut it so it's about the same size as this. I like to keep the backside plane so that I can place buildings on it to vary the type of scenes that this switch yard in fact can be used for. I'm gonna use code 70 microengineering track on the diorama. I'm gonna glue everything down with a sealant that is safe on foam but yet dries clear and does not have silicone in it so that the ballast can in fact stick to the track areas as the track is then glued down into place. So with that I'm gonna start working on this project and see if I can get this down as quickly as I can because I've got a photo shoot coming up in three days where I'm gonna need to use the brand new diorama that we're about to build. So let's see how this project turns out. So I'm cutting the diorama so it closely matches the same size as what I'm used to using and working with simply by taking a saw and cutting off the pieces. One thing that I do like to do on these dioramas is I always like to cut off the corner at about a 45 degree angle because what that does is it allows me to get the camera in close from the side because the corner usually blocks the scene and I wanna be able to get the camera in closer to the mainline trackage to get into the scene more intimately to share and show off the model. So what I've got is I've got this simple DeWalt pull saw. These things work really good on foam. I'm simply cutting out this corner with the saw. And then what we're gonna do next is we're gonna seal this foam all the way around on all sides with latex paint so it'll experience any type of foam degradation or foam shrinkage. I don't want the foam getting soft and starting to powder off over a period of years. So we're gonna do that next. So I've painted our diorama all the way around with latex paint. In this case, I'm using flat house paint. It really doesn't matter what type of latex paint you use on foam. It does the same thing. It helps seal the foam. I like to use a dark color. The darker the color, the better because then it doesn't show up through the ballast or the dirt in the event that you miss a spot. It all blends in with nice earth tone colors. So I'm gonna finish painting this and then we'll start establishing where we're gonna lay the track on this diorama. So I'm using micro engineering code 70 weathered rail, the spikes are scale. This track will look very good on film. And I'm laying a bit of a random pattern in that I wanna be able to use each side of this diorama for different types of settings. So I've angled two main lines here that are gonna go off to the sides and I'll be able to shoot great photos from this cut off corner looking this way up the diorama. Depending upon the sun's angle, I can turn this thing around and use it in various ways outside as I shoot it. I've got five tracks lined up assuming that the first two would be main lines and the second and third and fourth track here, fifth track would then be holding tracks for background freight cars during any one given photo shoot. And I've got plenty of flat space here to lay buildings and structures if I wanna break up the scene and add variety to it. So all I'm simply doing now is I'm fitting in my track. This is not track work where we actually need it to operate or run on the layout. This diorama probably will not be wired up and run. It's simply there to do still photography, which I think at this point, it'll work really good for what I've got planned out here. Another important thing to note is when you're using weathered micro-engineering track and you wanna put two sections of it together like I'm doing on this diorama, it's always important that if you use the weathered rail, you wanna take a dremel with a wire brush and in this case, this is a small three-quarter inch, half inch wire brushes. It's quite worn down. And after you pull off the ties and before you put on the rail joiners, what you wanna do is you wanna wire brush off the weathered part of the rail because that part will have difficulty conducting electricity and solder won't stick to it if in fact you're laying your track using this track, micro-engineering, to use on your layout where you actually wanna run a train. But because I don't have to run these trains here on this diorama, I'm simply just putting the track together with end-scale rail joiners. These rail joiners are very small, they're from Atlas, and they look really good and they're not too big. They don't take up too much space and look that obtuse when you're putting together your track work. They work really well on code 83, code 70 and code 55 is what these rail joiners work well on. So that's just another tip as we move along on this project. Another thing I like to do when I'm laying my track and this doesn't matter if it's a layout that I'm gonna run trains on or if it's just a diorama as I'm building here is I like to take a straight edge and I like to take a black Sharpie and I mark where the track placement, its final position will be on the diorama so that after I glue the track down I can then put it back in its approximate location as to where I want the track edge to lay on the diorama. And the black marker helps facilitate that a great deal when you're building a scene whether it's curved or straight trackage, just like that. Now let's talk about gluing down the track. I like to use in the past I've used this Quick Seal Plus from DAP. It dries clear. I've also got white here in fact, which dries white but I like the stuff that dries clear. It goes on white and when it cures it dries clear and it's a good adhesive whereas paint can stick to it. Well I've had a difficult time finding this in the past year at the Home Depot where I generally go to get some stuff and so I've discovered something else today after going through the entire store. I found this clear material also by DAP it's called Dynaflex 230 is what they call it. What I like to do, there's two ways to do this. You can put it onto a piece of foam and use it as your palette for the glue and then I like to take a painter's knife and I'll put the painter's knife in the material and apply it to the diorama and then lay the track into that. Another way that works really well is simply to take a bead of glue, run it up where the track's gonna go and then I'll take the painter's knife and smooth it out and then put the track in the bed of glue, which is what I'm about to do. I've already glued two sections of track down to make sure that everything's working the way it should and let me show you how I do this. This works for a diorama and or for a permanent layout. It's how I always adhere the track to a piece of foam because also this material does not affect or anyway damage and eat the foam. So with that, I'm gonna go ahead and show you how I do this briefly. Mind you, we've drawn our lines with the tracks in to go so I've got a bit of a guide to be able to follow here which makes it simple to do and then I'm gonna run my bead of glue all the way down the diorama where the track's gonna go. Then I'm gonna take my putty knife, my painter's knife and I'm gonna smooth it out to about the width of the trackage itself, just like this. Then I'm gonna lay the track right into the bed of glue and press it in and make sure everything's straight or curved depending upon what you're doing with your track working. In this case, I want it relatively straight on the diorama. You can also put weights on this as it cures to let it weigh down overnight while you're waiting for this to dry and this glue is going on white but again, when it cures, it will dry absolutely clear which is essentially what we want for doing this project and then what I'll probably do is take some Rust-Oleum Coma-Flage Earth Tone Brown paint and paint over the trackage areas just to make sure the rail, the rail jointers and everything is dark the way I want it to be for the final setup of this diorama that we're building. So let me continue on now gluing down the rest of these tracks onto the diorama and let's see what's next as we move along on this project. This is also the time in the project when you wanna glue down those ties that you removed to put in the rail jointers. Now all the spikes have been sanded smooth on these ties so that they'll simply slide into position into the glue and I've got two tracks that I have not completed yet and I'll show you, it's a very simple process of easily just slipping the tie underneath the rail. It's in the glue and it'll set up and it'll close that gap, that unsightly gap and everything will just look, it'll have the continuity that you want it to have just like that. So now we just wanna let all of this dry. Everything's glued into place now and the entire diorama doesn't look that great but when it dries clear and we paint over this and then cover it with ballast it should look absolutely just the way we want it to look for an outdoor photo shoot. So let's continue on with the project. While the glue is drying, I do like to put weights on the diorama just to make sure that none of the track work pops up or nothing moves. I just want everything to be flat and weighted down until all the glue becomes cure and clear and dries. I love it when a plan goes together but overnight while I was looking at the diorama and the track was being glued down and drying overnight under the weights I decided to change this up a little bit. I would like to be able to shoot trains especially auto racks on a surface of cement and apron and so what I've done is I've created this diorama where this whole half side of it is now gonna become a cement apron for loading auto racks or other railroad equipment with forklifts. So what I've done is I've taken a few strips of wood about an eighth of an inch high and I've glued them in the place creating forms of which we will fill the center area here with cement, make it all smooth with water and then take a razor saw and make the flange ways for the wheels in the cement. Now this time I'm using the same type of damp cement that you've seen me use in the past few years. It doesn't come in gallons anymore. Now it comes in quartz. So it'll be a little bit more difficult to work a wide trowel into the quart and what I may do is just scoop it out all on the surface, wet it and then spread it as you've seen me do in videos in the past. So let's see how this part turns out. So now that I've put down some forms and in fact I glued these down with wood glue in the last video you saw me do about two years ago I spiked them down with pins but I think wood glue will work in this case because this is a simple standalone diorama and it's going to look fantastic. Now here's the cement in the quart containers and what I'm going to do is use water and a trowel and start scooping it out on top of this diorama and make it the thickness of just the rail height all the way across the seam. And this should work pretty well. I'm also going to wet the material a little bit in the can, just give me some moisture. I know it looks like a mess now but it will turn out just right when it's finished. So I'm going to stop the recorder and continue to work my way through the diorama and pick this up as we get closer to the end. Now we want to take a 12 inch trowel in this case, wet it, make sure the surface is wet and pull it smooth across the top of the rails and the wooden forms that I've got. Just like this. It gives you a nice smooth cement surface, real nice. And now we just want to let this dry for an entire 24 hour period. So it's been about three hours since I put all the cement in place and I've taken this hacksaw blade and I've been running it while the cement is just starting to set up. I've been running it along the inside of the rails here to clean out the flange way, which works really, really well. I've done this for years on all the sections of tracks so far. I also took an exacto knife and I cut free the wood that we use to create the forms so that I can go ahead and just peel that out as the cement sets up further. And what this will do is this will allow the air to get into the cement on the sides here on the base and help set this up. Now it'll take about 24 hours for this to dry and as you can see, there's a lot of cracks starting to show on the surface and this is completely normal because what we do is we go back over the surface with a small painter's knife and just fill in the cracks, a little bit of water and I'll show you how to do that as we get to that part. But so far we've got a great subsurface now to create a auto rack loading facility and then of course the other side will simply be ballast and dirt and rock and we'll have a diorama that can be shot on either side to give a different type of result for every photograph that I would choose to do. So let's see how this continues on. So I'm using a painter's knife here and I sprayed a little bit of water inside the container of cement that I've got here and what I'm doing is I'm going over just like sparkling you would do on drywall work. I'm going over and I'm covering up some of the various cracks on the scene. Some cracks look really good and they're acceptable but in this case some of the larger ones I actually want to patch them and fill them in now and now everything hasn't completely dried yet it's still drying. There's a good skin on the cement at this point but all I'm doing is taking this putty knife this painter's knife and I'm simply taking the wet cement that I've got and I'm filling in the cracks and drawing the knife smoothing everything. I also use a bottle of water to spray it to help further smooth the cement into all the cracks and the adjacent areas so that the cement feathers out smooth on the edges and when it's all completely dry we'll simply take it and sand it with a sander and make everything smooth. So I'm in day three of building this switch yard project and the cement has dried overnight and it's all very smooth. I use this disk of 80 grit sandpaper and I sanded the entire diorama just to smooth things out after the cracks were repaired because this material does crack on its initial first application and then you go back and you can patch it like we did, like I showed you. I also used a hacksaw blade this cut off hacksaw blade right here and I ran it in the grooves where the real flanges will go so that it makes it very easy to just drop a freight car onto the seam now. Just like that, it's on the track and everything's smooth. Everything's just the way we want it to be for the photos. So now it's time to make the diorama a little bit darker, the cement work and I like to do that using India Ink. And India Ink is simply what it says, Black India Ink, you can get this at the art store. It's a very strong black liquid and I've got a jar of India Ink that I've been using for well over 15 or 20 years and all I do is I add a little bit of alcohol to it and a few more drops of India Ink to it every couple of years and it keeps on going. So I'm gonna do that now and I will show you exactly how that process works as I bring the camera down into position. Here's the jar that I put the India Ink in. I'm gonna use this dropper and I'm simply gonna drop in one eyedropper of India Ink into the bottle. Okay, I'm not using another eyedropper, I'm just gonna pour it in directly. Just a little bit, just like that. Doesn't take much. And then what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna fill the bottle with some fresh alcohol that I just picked up from the drugstore. This is a 71% alcohol. And just pour it in there just like that and shake it up. And that'll give me a nice dark coating of the India Ink which will soak into the cement and give me the effect of darker weathered pavement. As I pull the camera back, I like to use this and this is a brand new fresh two inch paintbrush. And here's how I do this. I wanna even coat on the entire scene. I'm gonna test it here inside and it looks good. So I'm just gonna simply apply this India Ink to the diorama just like this, wetting everything. See how the cracks just are accented just like this. It's looking good. I like the way that looks. And everything is now coated equally and evenly. Gives a nice darker effect. It's gonna look great in outdoor sunlight and that's it. All I do now is let this dry for about an hour and then we'll go to the other side and start ballasting and putting down dirt and finish the other side of this diorama so that it will be ready to shoot tomorrow first afternoon sun. So let's let this dry and we'll continue on with the rest of the scenery on this diorama. So we're almost up to the final step in the process and that is adding dirt. And for this, I'm gonna use real backyard dirt that I had been sifting for years and I've got a back stock of that. I'm gonna use gray ballast fine from Woodland Scenics. I'm also gonna use some light gray ballast to create a road, a gravel road adjacent to the trackage. India Ink is completely dry on this part of the diorama at this point. And so now what I'm gonna do is work on this area right here with our dirt and our ballast. I'm gonna be using artist paint brushes, a fan brush and a very nice smooth round brush for spreading the ballast in between the ties evenly and the dirt on the diorama. So let's continue on with that. When I sift out dirt, I'd like it to be relatively even all around the diorama. So I'm gonna start with the dirt and I like to use an old calendar to shake the dirt smooth onto the scene rather than just pouring the dirt out of the container. And as you'll see, this goes very rapidly. Makes a lot of dust in the room. It's a very good way to do this. I'm putting the dirt next to the cement next to the concrete work so that we'll have a smooth transition just like that. And I'm also gonna put some dirt out on the outside edge here of the trackage. Just like this, nice, smooth, even. Everything lays out just even using the screen to help spread it. That looks real nice. Just like this. Okay, maybe you didn't wanna drop this rock zone. I'll pick those out in the piece of grass. That was my oops moment as we do this live. Now I'm gonna apply the ballast. I also wanna take my fan brush and what I'll do is I'll brush the dirt off of the cement, off of the concrete work smooth just like this. So I have a nice even transition. Any event the vehicle drives off of the concrete work into the gravel dirt area adjacent to the cement work, the concrete work. It's important to get all the final topography of your layers the way you want them to be because once we put down the glue, it's permanent, everything stays the way you made it. Now I'm gonna put down the ballast and I'm gonna dump it right out of the container. I like doing it that way. Taking a nice edge, a nice transition edge between the dirt and the last piece of track here. See that? Now switch yards usually have a multitude of different types of gravel in them and this will be no different. I'll mix up things just a bit and I'll come over it with some paint and weather this yard after all the glue is completely dry and the ballast is dry. And that'll be the final step in our process of building the scene and she'll be ready to photograph tomorrow outdoors. There's no magic to this. Try to make it even. There'll be less brush work. The more even you make it in this stage of application, the less brushing you'll have to do with the paint brush, the smooth things out just right. A gravel road of some type, assuming it's limestone, a different stone that when the railroad brought in with the freight cars for the yard. So I'm applying this lighter coat of limestone which will weather it all together so it all blends and evenly looks sorta okay. For this service access road that I envisioned would be on this side of the yard. And just like that, we take our fan brush and we start brushing it smooth. Between the ties, evenly, gently. This part could take a while. This could take me probably 30 minutes to sit here and brush this all out just right. So what I'll do is I'll stop the camera as I do this portion of brushing things out. The process is straightforward and simple and then I'll bring you back when it gets time ready to put the dirt, put the glue onto the dirt. So here we are, one more step almost finished and the whole thing is looking pretty darn nice right now. I'm adding just a small amount of light green and medium green vegetation to the dirt areas on this diorama and a little bit on top of the track edge because you know what, this stuff grows everywhere. It just does in nature. It'll add some depth to the overall scene after the glue dries. I do this on every diorama just a little bit, just like that. And then I'm gonna come in and do a final brushing with the artist brush just to, actually I'm gonna blow it just to get it off of the pavement nicely like this. And that pretty much finalizes everything with regards to the diorama. Everything's looking good, the ballast is down, the indiate ink looks good on the concrete work and the yard, all the trackage looks good. So at this point, we almost have a completed scene here, complete with dirt, ballast, the yard trackages, everything looks good, a little bit of weathering with some paint, but the next step now is to take all of this and glue it all down with a couple bottles of Woodland Scenic Scenic Cement, which I'm gonna mix a bottle of it now. Generally what I like to do is put it into one of these sprayers, run it on fine mist, I'll pour two containers of Woodland Scenic Scenic Cement into this bottle and we're gonna wet the whole diorama including the cement work. Because when you wet this concrete work, what the Woodland Scenic Cement does is it seals it. So if I come along and I put a soda on it or a beer or some drink or any kind of liquid gets on it, it won't discolor the cement. In fact, it protects it just as it adheres and seals all of the ballast. So let's continue on with that. Let me mix a bottle and we'll spray it on and this thing will just have to dry and we're almost finished. So I've got my Woodland Scenic Scenic Cement in this bottle and everything has been mixed. All the chunks, I like to take some screen and get sometimes the chunks of glue that's set up at the bottom of the bottle and they'll completely dissolve. I like to screen them out just to make sure that the screen on the spray bottle doesn't get clogged during the process because then we'll have to stop and fix that before we can continue. We wanna have a very fine mist on this as so it doesn't disturb the dirt and the walnut shell ballast. So I'm gonna hold this now up above the diorama and let me see if I can get a good camera position for you to see me do this, such as live video. And I'm gonna hold this up now and spray this onto the scene just like this. I've got a piece of wood, I got a drop cloth at the table and it's okay again if this glue gets all over that cement that's what we want. And if you're gonna spray the cement you gotta do it evenly so you don't get any uneven coloring in the cement. We want everything to have the same continuity of wetness at this point. The ballast, the dirt, the ground foam is gonna get soaked very liberally. I've got two eight ounce bottles in this right now of Woodland Scenic Scenic Cement and we're probably not gonna use all of that. I just have a feeling. You want it to soak in. So if you're an eighth of an inch deep with material you wanna do the best you can. And the reason I use Woodland Scenic Scenic Cement is because it's already got a wetting agent built into it, mixed in, which really lets it soak in to the walnut shell ballast and the dirt nicely. I'm gonna spray this until the diorama looks white and then we'll let it dry overnight, just like that. All the cement has got the Woodland Scenic Cement on it, the glue. The cement work has got the white glue on it. What I do like to do before it all sets up is I like to come across the cement now with a paper towel and just wipe up the excess white glue so it doesn't give me a thicker possible white dried effect. So I'm just gonna wipe this off with a paper towel briefly. And that's all there is to it. So the Woodland Scenic Scenic Cement has been drying for about four hours. I got a couple little fans on it helping to speed up the process. But I wanna take this Rust-Oleum camouflage paint now and I wanna just go over the scene a little bit just to weather up the trackage on this side of the diorama. So what I wanna do is I'm not using an airbrush, obviously I'm using a can of paint because it works. And I'm just gonna just spray, just to kind of blend the colors and bring it all into a nice weathered, see that? We're gonna write down the center of the tracks really well for weathering a yard area. Just like that. Subtle, just to blend things together a little bit. There's one characteristic of Woodland Scenics ballast that used to drive after trains, crazy. When I had the ballast on the side of the rail where it's not supposed to be. And that's because when we spray on the Woodland Scenics glue, what it does is sometimes the water is beating up along the side of the rail and some of the ballast is attracted up with that. And therefore the ballast is then glued to the side of the rail. As I can share with you this freight car on the new section we just built, listen to this. What that is is ballast buildup on the inside. And there's no easier way to do it than simply take your fingernail or your thumbnail and run it up along the side of the rail on the inside and the outside. And that'll remove any of the Walnut Shell ballast or if you use rocks, the same differentiation whereas it will be cleaned right off. It's as simple as that. But if you don't do it and you go outside and take photographs of your models, here we are with ballast stuck to the side of the rail which is not at all, prototypically correct at all. It's not the way things work. So other than that, that's just another quick tip as the scene is now drying and I'm starting to take out some models which we'll be shooting over the next three days on this brand new scene that we just built. So after four days of building this beautiful diorama, today I finally have taken it outside and doing a photo shoot with it. I'm shooting some beautiful SafePak auto racks from ROKA prototype models and these models are absolutely beautiful. The diorama itself worked out really well in that I've got the squid yard on one side as planned to shoot photos. And then on the other side, I've got the cement apron in which for some of the photographs, I used a ramp that Mike Buddy had built to help illustrate and show off these freight cars. The models themselves are absolutely amazing. You can check these models out on a What's Neat show that ran in the middle of December when these models were announced and shared with the public for the very first time. The diorama, again, is working very well. The cement apron in the background is set up so I could actually put buildings on it that would complement this yard trackage area right here. It'll reverse the diorama and shoot the cement apron areas and I can still put buildings on top of this track work here if I still wanted to have a different type of background. Beautiful day to be doing a shoot with this brand new diorama and all of the techniques and tricks that we use to build this could be used on a permanent home layout and or a diorama for you to shoot outdoor photos with. And so with that, that is this segment on diorama construction for this January's What's Neat. For this special segment of What's Neat for January 2023, I've got Larry Harrington all the way from beautiful Philadelphia, Pennsylvania from Bachman Industries here to tell us about some amazing new products. Is that right? Yeah, so some stuff we talked about before but it's still relevant and it's coming to your door really soon. So hope you had a really good holiday, Ken. I did. It was awesome. Yeah, so it's getting really cold now so we'll talk about a few things. First off, the Dash 9's large scale should be getting to you pretty soon. They should have left the water as we taped. We got the production samples flown in. Beautiful. Here's one, I barely can get it on screen. I brought two samples with me today because they're so big I could barely fit them in the room with me. So these things weigh 11 pounds each. They have four motors in them. They pull a ton and I brought the Santa Fe. I'll sit that down here and I got the, there's a couple of detail parts that I didn't put on because these are fresh out of the box like the antennas and stuff. But I just, so they're not missing those things that there's a view of the CSX front on there. Absolutely gorgeous. A lot of detail, a lot of extra parts on the top too. You try to get this in the screen here. It's hard so. Yes, I need to make sure the garden railroad is constantly in perfect repair so that I can videotape those things running. So there's some neat features about this. The center pops off on the top of the roof here. When you get, you have a lot of options that you can hold it up just well, there you go, perfect. There you go. There's a control panel in there and you can turn on lights, smoke, battery powered polarity and a number of things there. So it's easy to get to, you don't have to take your whole locomotive apart. You just basically snap the roof back on when you're done. So it just pops right back on. Nice. So that's coming to you soon. I know we've said that a couple of times, but good things take time to do so. No, that's an awesome thing. Thank you for sharing that. So one thing, it does come with an adapter that shows, that plugs in, you can hook up just about any type of command system that you have. So we're all excited about this. This is our first one to 29th diesel locomotive and we have really good response so far. So we can't wait to get them out to the dealers and consumers and see them on the garden railways. Every model railroaders should have one of those if nothing else on their mantle. Right, exactly. It's a beautiful piece. It's a beautiful piece, exactly. So this is the time of the year when it's cold and nasty and you're stuck inside your house. So what is there to do besides model railroading? So I just wanted to remind everybody of a lot of the products that we have to expand upon your model railroad. First of all, you wanna make your model railroad bigger. You need track. We have Easy Track and HO actually in three different styles. This is our nickel silver track. This is if you have a starter set. This is our steel alloy. This is all black and it will match up. All these will connect together. So it doesn't matter as far as interconnectivity but just to match the style that you have. We're just shipping, we just shipped in December the city sprinter set. And this was the first set that came with our concrete tie track. Nice. So we have extra track that you can add onto that set as well. So I don't know how many, I didn't look up how many SKUs that we have but our track selection is tremendous. So we also came out last year with bridges. These are the Easy Track bridges that you can just plug right in. They have the connectors and snaps right into your Easy Track. Wow. We did them in I believe five different road names or decorations. So and that keeps expanding. And we also announced that in end scale at NMRA. So it's just been a very popular item. We do have an end scale. We have upside down here. We got end scale track. Very nice. Again, a number of SKUs. We have turnouts. We have, in HO we have DCC equipped turnouts but we also have a DCC control box which I didn't bring with me today that has, that you can convert basically your analog electrically operated tracks into a DCC turnout. So it just plugs in. If you have the original control box on your control panel, you just basically unplug the wires and plug the new one in to the exact same footprint. And it's easy to program. It takes about 30 seconds to program a DCC switch. And then of course, once you get the track down you're gonna need to do some landscaping. So we have trees in numerous sizes. This is one of our smaller trees. This is a two inch, the two and a quarter inch walnut tree. And it's listed as end scale, but I'd like to say that trees have no scale. This is one of our larger trees. This is listed under O scale as an eight to 10 inch conifer tree. But again, trees growing all sizes, the small ones, if you have a larger layout you can use your end scale for your shrubbery. Trees that around the houses and your layout are urban scenes where the trees line the streets and stuff like that. So there is no scale. You just use what you need for your application. And we have a large variety of trees to choose from. Of course, we have some figures as well. Showing some HO, we have them in HO and HO and O scale and a few in end, but not many. And then here is another example. These are great for passenger cars. They're in there so they fit perfectly in the seeds. And here's another set that we have there. So that's just three examples. We have a good number of examples of things to use for your layout. Also, we have some detailed structures. These are resin structures. Those are beautiful. Yeah, this comes with some signage that you can modify and put on your name or your town on there. And well, I can't forget this. This is what started it all for us and trains was our plastic go line. We just celebrated our 75th anniversary and we have numerous structures in HO and O scale. Back, this started to believe in 1946 or so. So it's been around for a good long time. So this is, like I said, this is a time, it's great time of the year to concentrate on your layout. You don't have any hard work to do. You may have to shovel snow every once in a while. But you have plenty of time to play with your layout and get things tweaked and enjoy it because this is the time of the year that you're not, unless you're traveling, it's you're stuck inside. So you might as well have a good time with it. That's very true. And all the viewers can see the people, the Scenescape line of trees, the Easy Track line and all of the products that you described at your website, is that correct? That's correct, yes. And that website is? If you want to go right to the store, it's shop.bachmentrains.com or you can just go to bachmentrains.com on our website and go and search through the menus. That's very true. You can also go to, I didn't mention, but you also may want to be tuning up your locomotives and things and you need parts. We have a good selection of parts from our website as well. So you can get what you need. If it's in stock, you can, if it's not shown in stock, you can always give our service department a call or email and they will be happy to assist you. There you go. And with regards to after you've gone through the Bachman website and you find out what you want, the show sponsor, Lombard Hobbies in Lombard, Illinois, you can find your products there and they're ship them out right away as soon as you place your order. Well, that's all I have for today. I just want everybody to have a good time. I hope they survive the winter and we can see you at a show soon. Well, we should be doing the Springfield Show in Massachusetts and the Amherst Modelers Society. That's a great show every year. We see all the serious modelers there. They're always excited to come to our booth and check out all the new things we have to show. So looking forward to seeing our friends in Massachusetts soon. That's a fantastic show. Larry, thank you so much for presenting these wonderful new products for this January What's Neat and we just always look forward to what it is you've got to share. Thanks, we should be having some new test shots coming up in the near future of some of the new projects we announced at NRA and we will be happy to bring them on the show as well. Awesome. Well, thank you so much, Larry and that is the segment for What's Neat. All of the products seen on this episode of What's Neat are available from Lombard Hobbies in Lombard, Illinois or order online at LombardHobbies.com. Bachman Trains. Now that's the way to run a railroad. Check out their website at BachmanTrains.com and buy ROCA prototype models. We make it real. Check out their website at www.rocamodels.com.