 I'm Charlie Comstock of model railroad hobbyist magazine, and I'm underneath the hobby Smith hobby store in the train room of the Columbia River n scale club and you guys are a modular n-track club And any can I get your names? I'm David water street. I'm Dallas. Ty Hurst. Well. Thank you very much for having me What was it that? The club is n scale and n-track what what is it about n-scale and in track that attracted you Well for one thing I saw a layout many years ago And I was impressed with the fact that you have such small trains and such a huge amount of scenery That looks real you can't do that in a lot of on the scale because you need much bigger scenery Here it just seems to fit we got a lot more trains in a lot more running a lot more switching But just it just seems like the right scale for us You get a better ratio of track to scenery. It is one of the big things that started it Well, what is it that are there any problems with n-scale or any track things that you don't like? the biggest problem a lot of folks talk about is simply the size of it and Particularly with a lot of the modelers who are older modelers and our fat arthritic fingers gets harder and harder to handle the real small trains, but With with a little bit of finesse you can work through that and it's just how much attention you want to pay to detail in the small scale But we've got every much as detail I think is the eight shows HO modelers do in our n-scale Equipment and running stock layouts that sort of thing But it's a finer scale and you have to be a little more careful with what you're doing and how you're modeling and And the details that you can achieve and then the model model railroad Manufacturers have come a long way the last 15 years Yeah, you see a lot more stuff coming out to help us and they're actually kind of jumping on the bandwagon a little bit Makes it nice for us because in skill It was kind of like a step child for a long time. Ajo had everything now. It's starting to pick up makes our job a lot easier What sets you guys apart with your n-track modules from other n-track clubs? Probably the biggest thing is Where we are, you know, we're in the gorgeous Columbia Gorge here in Oregon And we've got just absolutely tremendous prototypical scenery to model which is what the Name of the club, you know goes after is the Columbia Gorge here in Oregon And we certainly have got a lot of just beautiful natural scenery to model and emulate Which is what we've tried to do here on our modules and as Dallas was saying People that know the area and have traveled the gorge will recognize scenes that we've captured here on the layout And now that you've got all these modules put together Is there anything that you've learned that you would have you would have done things differently when you were doing the building? Well the one thing for sure that we learned was every module used to have individual lakes We're on every corner of the module and that was so long and taking down and putting up that we agreed Agreed to put in what they call pocket legs the standardized that pockets You just put the lot the module on the legs. You're done. Is there anything special? You're doing a module construction for rigidity and lightweight or any anything that isn't standard for that Well, we kind of continue to use a phone From core board or whatever it takes to make a real life home core board. Sure. Where we need it roads Oh, he's bum cord up for a flat surface. Yeah, then we use a pink foam or a white foam for scenery and Anything to make a lightweight obviously so we don't have to kill ourselves moving it There's a plaster here basic Joel Brackton geodesic foam stuff we've experimented with that a little bit We haven't gone because this is again most of these modules are Number years old. We haven't gotten into that yet But we are experimenting with that and have on a couple of instances, but we haven't gone full-scale that working well for you I've done a number of layouts using that it works very well, and I'm very enthusiastic about it How's the cost of that compared with traditional plaster? my experience is the raw materials tend to be a little more expensive, but the time that you save in doing that I Think exceeds the the additional or the cost savings you would have in traditional plaster plus it's flexibility It's a flexibility flexibility that you can take the molds when the when the rocks or the The cast hard shell that you use as a foundation comes out of the mold It has a tremendous elasticity to it, and so you can mold it you can by mold it I mean by form it you can shape it in the any kind of a Shape that you want of what they have with the rocks already cast into it so you can you can Shape it into a ravine you can shape it into a an outcrop of sort What about the young water basically what we do to start with is we do our landforms Where we plan on having the water we smooth it down as much as we can then we come on with joint compound We spread it get everywhere where we want to go then we get a wet sponge Wet on the edge and make little waves all the way through As many as we want as often as high as we want by using a sponge And we let that dry and we come back we paint it Light around those small edges darker in the middle or deepness Then we let that dry for a few days make sure it's correct not cracked and we do we repair it then we gloss coat it And then here's what it looks like as a finished product