 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 BachmanTrains.com. And by Roka Prototype Models. We make it real. Check out their website at www.rocamodels.com. And thank you for helping us support the best hobby in the world. This is What's Neat for February 2023. I'm your host Ken Patterson. And this month we've got a really good show in that. We start a four part series in layout construction where I build a layout from start to finish that's got interchangeable sections on it so that you can change your layout but yet still keep it all the same. There'll be a further explanation in the introduction of the first part of four months of material that we're gonna run that's very in depth. Every step of the process, laying the track, building the scenery, building the buildings, we cover everything in this four part series coming up on What's Neat for layout construction. Also this month we've got Larry Harrington from Bachman Industries all the way from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania that shares with us some of the latest new products that they have this year offered to us, modelers. Plus if you haven't checked it out be sure to look at the What's Neat this week video show that we shoot every week during the month except for the last weekend keeping you updated on What's New in the Hobby with current events, all the special guests that we have from around the country that come visit plus a regular podcast crew. It's always entertaining every week to find out What's Neat this week in model railroading. And so with that let's continue on with the rest of the February 2023 What's Neat. Hello, this is Michael Gross and you're watching What's Neat with Ken Patterson. My name's Ken Patterson and in this video we're gonna discuss the science and the construction that it takes to build a beautiful shelf layout. Shelf layout that's designed to fit in your apartment, small confined space where you wanna build a layout one small section at a time or in this case, I'm gonna build a shelf layout that fits on my home way out up in a second level where I have to go up a 4% grade just to be able to get to the small town site that we're going to build. We're gonna build a bunch of laser cut buildings. We're gonna build an engine house, a train station, a freight depot and then we're going to scratch build a turntable. So I'm gonna walk you through the process in great detail on all of that in this two hour and about 10 minute video on building shelf layouts. Then once we do finally accomplish building our scene finished, I'm gonna show you how to build a complete full layout to work your shelf layout into. Something say five feet by 12 feet where you can have a continuous loop all the way around and have trains running through your shelf layout which then can be interchanged with various scenes on the same five by 12 layout. I'm gonna walk you through the process from the very beginning of the base of that layout when the concept was thought about and then we're gonna do the scenery work. We're gonna start by building some mountains carving the terrain, dropping in some fake fur and some scenery material and end up with a really nice pine forested diorama type of a layout that's still very lightweight, made of foam and can fit in a man cave quite comfortably. So kick back, you've got a great learning session coming here, building a full blown layout and a shelf layout to work into that in this video coming up on shelf layouts. I've got this one section of my layout where it's all hidden staging and what it is is it's just no scenery, it's just an area where I stage trains, holding tracks to let things run on the layout and I thought how cool would it be if I came off of this narrow gauge trackage that runs through the hidden staging, no scenery and add and say a 4% grade going up and up to an upper town, way up high so you'd feel like you're actually going somewhere following prototype standards. So I've created this main line that in fact does run all the way up to an upper shelf above the hidden staging yard and I will put some scenery up on there. Now this area of the layout is simply gonna be an area of about one foot by eight feet long. Now I'll tell you back 20 years ago when we were in the dating business and more interested in girls and trains I still had a little bit of moderating going on where I built this section of layout that was one foot by about six feet long and I absolutely tricked it out and just scratch built the John Allen engine house board by board, hand laid the track, hand laid the switches, just kind of experimented with a little rainbow guttering for the bench work and this whole diorama really came out kind of neat. I took a lot outdoor photos and so that's what I'm doing now with the section that's gonna be above and up in the air on this upper deck. This narrow gauge section is gonna be an end point where similar to one of the old mines you'll have us three tracks, one for dropping off cars, one for picking up loads and a turntable up here to be able to spin and turn around your locomotive point it in the right direction and head back down the hill again. So even though it's small eight feet by one foot I think I can pack a lot of interesting operation and some scenery into this. So hang tight and I'll show you how this project sort of turns out. For this diorama I'm gonna need to construct a turntable rather than buy one commercially I'm simply gonna make one out of microengineering girders. So the first thing we need to do is design our pit and let me just show you a quick way that I figured out a way to do that. My biggest locomotive that I'm gonna have to run on the scene on this hill at the top is gonna be one of these K 27s. Look at that dish right there. It's just the right size. So I'm gonna take the dish, I'm gonna lay it down where the turntable is gonna go. Then I'm gonna draw a circle and just make sure in this tight spot that I've got everything's gonna work. I'll have plywood on the outside and I may carve this down into a hill and have the turntable possibly hanging off the side of a hill. Not sure how I'm gonna do that just yet but now that I've got the circle drawn let's drop a router on this and cut out the pit. Now I'm gonna talk about routering out the turntable bowl because what we're gonna discuss now is the depth of the bowl and how I arrive at that depth using a router and setting up the pit. I've got a bowl here for example of one that I'm working on and we're gonna cut two holes with the router. First we're gonna cut out a center hole and then we're gonna cut out the outside hole and each depth is going to be different. The center hole, which is only gonna be a couple of inches in diameter is set to the deepest point of your turntable bridge. I've made a drawing here of a turntable bridge and if you look, the deepest section is the middle section right here of the bridge. So that would be the highest point of this micro-engineering girder. For example, if I were to use micro-engineering girders I'm probably going to end up building a gallows wooden turntable for that and in that case, if I've already cut out my depth which I'm going to do to the full length of this girder, I can then stack railroad ties in the bottom of the pit to the height of where the wooden gallows turntable would be which would be pretty level all the way to the outside edge of the bowl but I'm gonna have a nice V cut in it to the depth as you look at this router bit I've got this already preset up to the depth. So what I'll do is I'll take this router now I'll plunge it into the center and make the small hole and then I'm gonna reset the router depth to the outside edge depth that you see right here on the paper drawing. So that means that it would be more shallow this girder would be cut through the saw at the angle so that it would be a lower depth router bit just enough for the turntable bridge and if you wanna put a rail in there to study it you can also put a rail around the outside of the pit which I'm sure I will do in this case. So when I do that then I'll set the router up for a depth that's not as high not as deep and then I'll router out the entire bowl and then take a sure form planer and bring the bevel even carving it out by hand. So you'll see that in these next video clips as I go through that process. You can start laying any track we've got to prepare our switches. Now what do I mean by that? Let me explain to you this. I am using Shinohara HON3 turnouts I really like these. They come with constant power all the way throughout the turnout so that means the frogs are live. And what I've got to do in that case is right about where this rubber band is here make a notch in each one of these center rails so that I don't have a short when I'm throwing my switches and I've got turnouts at opposing ends facing each other like this. Okay, so we have to make our notches right here and that's the first thing I wanna do. The second thing I'm gonna do is add jumper wires. Let me first show you how we make the notches in the turnout. You've got to do this to all these Shinohara turnouts. I've got a dremel here with a cut off disc on it. Now that cuts my notch right here so both of these rails. Now neither one of these rails will be able to have power so what I've got to do is run jumper wires across the rails and I'll take small wires I've already got some cut here and I'm gonna put those wires right across here like this. I'll show you how to do this in a minute and then I'll solder these on after I cut away the plastic ties that are underneath here and in order to cut away the plastic ties and allow us to do this to begin with I like to use a soldering tip and I just take the tip and I'll just cut into down to the rail and put in my jumper wires and I had to cut out the center one here so I have space for the wire. Same thing on this side. Taking my soldering iron and I'm letting the tip melt into the plastic and cut that out and make room right here for the wire to fit. So now you can see where the rail is exposed so I can do my soldering on that now. Now I use flux for my soldering and I use paste flux so I'm gonna put my brush in the flux and just clean off the rails here where the plastic is or was and that's where my solder will flow to. And I'm gonna do this real time with you so that you can see how long it actually takes to do one turnout and you've got to do every one of your turnouts this way. And whether you're using DCC or not, you've got to do this. Regular DC you still have to do the same thing. I'm gonna use this knife to hold it down. I wish I had three hands here. I got my solder. I got my iron. I'm gonna pick up a little solder on the tip and put it right on my spot right here. A little bit more solder on the tip to do the other side. And my jumper wire is in place that will now power the center rail. Now I wanna do another one just like it where we made our other cut right there. So I'm gonna hold it down. Put a little bit of my paste flux on that spot. Some solder on the tip and bring the tip down into place. It gets hot, the rail gets hot. It all sets up real nice and I've got power continuity there. And I wanna do the other side. And this finishes the switch. It doesn't make the switch DCC friendly as that word is thrown around a lot but let's just say it makes the switch friendlier so that you can use it without having any shorts. Now my frogs are powered by the switch points. My notches are made where they need to be made and we've put in these jumper wires here. It wouldn't hurt to paint those black. That's kind of ugly with the wire I'm using here and sand down the ties so that the switch is gonna fit flush back into position again. I'm sanding down the rough edges of the siding iron made. And this finishes the switch and you've gotta do this every one of your turnouts. Put in the jumper wires. Look at where these wires run from. The wires run from the outside rail to the outside second track and from the inside rail to the second tracks rail right here. And that's the continuity so that these two rails are now powered. The frog is powered by the points. The outside rails will have power in them all the time and this turnout will not short out. So now we can start laying the track and putting it all up and sitting it into position on the diorama. Now I'm laying the track on the diorama. I'm using micro-engineering track and the beauty of this is after I wire brush off the weathering solution that they used to weather the rail, it's really easy to bend the track the way you want it to be. And it stays in the shape that you want it. And it's a wonderful characteristic. Let me get this rail-engineering going here. It's a wonderful characteristic when you're laying this type of track because then I know where everything's gonna be and then I can come back over it with in this case, I'm gonna use silicone and a small spatula and glue the track down. After I get everything lined up and solder all the joints and then I'll be ready to glue the track down and then I'll come back over and I'll do the ballasting, a little bit of grass and just make it a quick scene and then I'll have to go ahead and I'll start wrapping the sides in oak. Put on the oak plywood, stain it nice. It's gonna be very thin but the oak will still give a little bit of a keep it from flexing. And of course I'll have to finish the turntable pit in the bridge at some time down the road but the fact is after the ballast and the scenery and everything goes on, I've got a nice little location at the top of the hill where I can spot a train, drop off cars, pick up cars, turn something around, park something in an engine house or just go back down the hill again. So what an interesting operation just out of one foot by eight foot hang on a shelf on the wall. Now I'm using 6040 rosin solder on this. It's already got the flux in it and rosin solder doesn't hurt the electrical. So, and in this case, I'm not, I don't have any wire for the acid core solder to wick up into. So if I was using acid core solder, I could actually do that on the track joints and it would flow beautifully. But this is working really well with this rosin solder and I've already got some paste flux on the track which is why the solder flows. If we didn't use rosin or any kind of cleaning agent at all in the solder to clean this rail as it's soldering, this solder wouldn't even stick. It would not stick to the metal. So because of the rosins that are in it or if I were using acid core flux on this in this case, that would cause it to flow very nicely. So that's what you do again with the pencil tip rig and that's what I'm using here is this nice pencil tip rig right here to solder this track work together and in any scale, be it end scale, in this case I'm actually doing end scale rail joiners for HO scale track code 70. That's the best way to do it. They fit perfect. So that's how we use the pencil tip for soldering track. Smooth, and this will glue the track down permanently. And it won't hurt the foam because the foam is all sealed with latex paint and I'm using liquid nails. I didn't use silicone on this because liquid nails just works really well and a ballast will stick to liquid nails whereas ballast doesn't like to stick. Nothing sticks to silicone except for silicone itself. So I use liquid nails on this because the ballast will stick to it. It doesn't hurt the foam. It holds the track down beautifully. Now when I'm putting the track down on stained plywood which I do a lot of that around here, I do use silicone, clear silicone because it doesn't look too up too, so it doesn't look ugly. Like this liquid nail would look ugly on beautifully finished wood. Carefully lift up the track and work your way along with the putty, nice, smooth. You don't need very much liquid nail. Too much comes up through the ties and it doesn't look good. And we'll put it down kind of sparingly. It doesn't take much, this stuff holds. You wanna work pretty quick because I've already got a skin starting to form on this material. But it'll be done here in about five minutes. I'll have all this track laid and I may put weights on this right now. Doesn't look like I have to. I'll end up putting weights on all of this. Keep the glue away from the switch points and the switch mechanisms. I've got circles drawn on the foam to keep the way from that area. After all the track is glued down, I like to come through and weather the track with a little Rust-Oleum camouflage. And it doesn't take much, just enough to cover up some of the rails and some of the liquid nails. And if you look, I've got the flange ways and the points taped across. So I don't have to worry about cleaning this paint out of those areas, just like this. This paint doesn't have any fumes, it's virtually fume-less, so I don't worry about a mask here. Now just clean the tops with some sandpaper, a little bit of track cleaning tool. And this track is ready to go, ready for ballast. I covered the diorama with dirt that I sifted through a screen that I actually dug out of my backyard. I use this dirt for all of my dioramas. We're gonna go in a great detail on how to do this when we build the five foot by 12 foot layout that's gonna be incorporated with our shelf layout. But as you can see here, I just simply sprinkle on the dirt, ground foam, a little bit of ballast, which is ground up rock. And then I spray everything with woodland scenic, scenic cement. And then again, when we go into the 12 foot by five foot layout, we are gonna seriously cover this in great detail. I'm gonna get your hands dirty. There you go. So this woodland scenic, scenic cement's gonna soak everything real nice and give me an even coat. Where no other dirt's gonna come up, all the ground foam's gonna stay in place. And then we'll follow up with some individual grass tufts. And this should look pretty nice. Quick, nice, fast diorama, just like that. Now that we've got a great deal of the scenery done on our one foot by eight foot diorama, it's time to discuss the electrical. Now, I made a control panel here out of a piece of plexiglass and some block, some on and off switches from a radio shack. And what I've got here is something that's gonna fit onto the diorama. Just right, right here into position. It'll fit because I'm gonna take the hot foam cutter and cut out a box groove inside the front. And then our plywood is gonna go over the top of this around the edges so that all you'll see is the nice block switches for all five blocks. So one, two, three, four, and then five going into the turntable. Plus, I've also added a double pole, double throw switch right here so that we can change the polarity in the turntable. And that's gonna work out just fine. I've also added one additional switch, which is a simple on and off switch, so that I can add lighting to the buildings on here and be able to turn the lights on and off at my discretion. Now, in order to do the turntable, I've discovered that I can take a microphone jack and simply stick the jack in here and mount the turntable on the microphone jack so that it'll spin and I'll have power to the bridge of the turntable just the way I want it. Now, I wanna discuss the control panel one more time and tell you how it is that I've arrived at this beautiful finish and the way this is built. What I did was I took a piece of plexiglass and I ran it through the saw and I cut out all the holes here one by one on the scroll saw for the switches to fit into. Then I had to take a Dremel motor tool and I had to kinda grind out the holes just a little bit larger so that everything, all the switches would fit into them very nicely. Then what I did was I took this piece of plexiglass and I painted it a metallic black color on one side so that as I peeled off the paper, I would end up with this really nice finish on the control panel so that it looks very nice with the woodwork and everything that's gonna wrap around it. All the wiring underneath simply will go to the control panel through the grooves that we've cut out with the router so everything will be power routed simply with one wire going from each switch to each block in order to turn the tracks on and off so that we can park a locomotive and have it off in the event that I'm programming something else on the layout and I don't wanna accidentally program a locomotive that's sitting there. So that's why I like the blocks. One additional thing in order to bring the main power into the diorama, I've added this jack, this microphone jack switch. So all I'll simply do is plug in a microphone jack into this with power leads on it and the diorama will have power and this will be covered up with plywood too so that only the jack will show and everything will be solid. Once the wood's wrapped around, we're gonna have a beautiful finished diorama ready just to either go outside for photography or sit on its high perch down here in the basement and be fun to operate on. A place to take a train, somewhere way up high, somewhere where you're somewhere else. You feel like you're really going someplace when you do something like this. Now this is the part of the video where we're gonna discuss wiring up our panels. Now I really love these rocker switches. I picked these up from Radio Shack. Recently they closed most of the Radio Shacks around where I live. So now I order these online and I think when I buy them they come 10 at a time and the reason I like these switches is because when they mount flush on a panel, they're actually flush when you quantify the fact that I'm putting a piece of plywood which is an added thickness around the edges. So everything works out real nice and flush. Now I wanna discuss wiring these up. Now we're taking power from the inside rail and that's gonna be my blocked power too. That's the power I'm gonna turn off is the inside rail of each of the blocks and there's five of them. This panel in front of you, I've got a three switch panel here. This was for something else but this will help in describing exactly how I wired this. I like to use this copper antenna wire as my main wire across all of the switches. So on all five switches on our panel and in this example there's only three, I'll take this wire and I'll solder it right there. And actually you can see I've already done that with this black wire. It doesn't matter if it's sheathed or unsheathed because everything else is protected underneath and these wires will never move inside the control panel area in the foam. So once this wire is connected, this is the wire that will be soldered somewhere to the layout where that inside rail will have constant power. And in this case I did it right at the microphone jack where the power comes in. So this wire is soldered to the main power and then the switches will be the on and off for each track. So this next little metal is where we're gonna solder the wire, the actual wire that's gonna run from the panel to each rail. And in order to solder this to the rail, I find it's really easy to take a dremel motor tool and a wire brush and wire brush off the rail first. Then what I need to do, and I want you to watch this in real time. So I'm gonna try to go slow on this description but I have to punch a hole through from each inside rail track to the control panel area. And I usually do this with a steel or a copper or a brass tube, very small in diameter, about an eighth of an inch. And sometimes I'll fish the wire right through that. In this case, the hole that you see me punching isn't far enough, it'll go right through to the control panel area. I like to clamp the wire and solder it in place, you know, using the clamp to hold it. And then of course the orange wire that's coming through to the control panel you can see here I'm soldering it now to the switch. You don't want to touch that switch very long. If you get that too hot, you can melt the insides and ruin it. And then of course, we're gonna come to the point where it's gonna be time to stuff all these wires back in. So that's kind of a quick description, an easy description of wiring. The inside rail is the one that we're blocking. The outside rail, the back rail will have constant power all the time. And by being able to turn off these blocks you'll ensure that, you know, if you want to shut down that block and turn off the sound system, that locomotive you can do it. While we're discussing wiring, I also want to discuss the double pole, double throw switch that we're gonna use on the turntable in order to reverse polarity so that when you turn your locomotive around and come back onto the approach track you won't have a short. And that double pole, double throw switch of course is right here on the layout and it operates the turntable and it's already wired up. I've got two wires from the microphone jack to the turntable kit right here. Now I haven't built the turntable bridge yet. I'm pretty sure I'm gonna build a wooden gallows bridge but I'm not exactly, at this point, sure exactly what I'm gonna build. That's something that will be covered in this video when I figure that part out. Now here's a larger double pole, double throw switch. I'm gonna use this as an example to show you how these things are wired up. You can see there's six terminals on the back and it's really important and it's really easy to wire this up correctly. Here on a piece of paper I've got the six terminals drawn just like you see on the back of the switch. Now let me with one hand hold the camera and describe to you how this works. The power wires come in right here at the top and then we're gonna solder wires across the switches, poles on the back. It's called cross paralleling and this is what's gonna allow us to have our change in polarity on the bridge. The wires that go to the turntable bridge are gonna come from here and here so that as the power coming in here is constant when we flip this switch it will reverse the power so that the plus power and the minus power coming out will change to minus and then plus on this side and that's how a double pole, double throw switch is wired and that's how that works and that's exactly how I'm putting it in on this layout and once I get the turntable bridge wired up and figure if I'm building a wooden bridge or a, I'm pretty sure it's gonna be wood. I'm not gonna use these microengineering girders for the turntable but I'll get to that part when we get to it. I just now wanna do essentially explain the double pole, double throw switch to you. And when I get the control panel all wired up then I'll simply push it into place and use just a little bit of glue to hold this plexiglass section in place until it dries and then we'll go over that with a nice layer of plywood. Wet everything and then I put on this gorilla glue and this will glue in the control panel all the way around. Everything's wired up now. Wet it and then it'll finish it, it'll bond. We don't worry about the electric kit and wet because it's not gonna be used for so long and there's plenty of time to dry. Now I'm gonna put a weight on top of this and let it sit. And the foam glue, the gorilla glue will ooze out. Probably make a mess for me to clean up. But it'll be well worth it. I'm gonna let that sit on there just like that. And that'll keep that right where we want it, just right. Now that we've got our control panel put in, I've put in all the block wiring. Everything's wired up and ready to go on this diorama. I wanna use this great stuff, foam pro, and I'm gonna fill all the cracks where the wires are and then we'll cut it off smooth the saw and it'll keep all the wires self-contained in the diorama. So when it slides around in its position, nothing will be hanging out. Now something different I've tried this time that I've never done before and that is I've taken small staples. The ones, actually, what are these? These are about one inch staples that I use for my stapler, my electric staple gun, my air staple gun, either one, they fit. And what I've done was I've separated these staples with a pair of needle nose pliers and I pushed them in in various spots to hold the wire down because there's a lot of wire here and it wasn't gonna stay down by itself and tape wasn't gonna take care of the situation for me. The only thing that would do it would be these staples and they'll stay in the foam and they're not protruding through to the top side of the scenery. So the next thing I wanna do is I wanna get my stuff here to come out of the can and I always like to do that over a trash can for the initial squirt that the gun sometimes isn't ready. Now this one's ready to go. And what I need to do now is just take this and run it all the way along the seam and I'll fill this whole seam up with the material. It's gonna get under the wire, around the wire. Just gonna fill that area. It's working out really good. I've got good foam contact and I'm surrounding the wires and that should do it. I'll come back after a hot cup of tea in about an hour and this will all be dry and ready to be shaved off smooth. I've let a couple hours go by and the foam is set up. The wires are in good. Nothing's protruding through and I'm simply taking my flat saw and I'm sawing flush along the bottom of the foam, the pink foam and removing the orange filler that we put in to cover up the wires. And this is working out beautifully. This is so nice. You can paint this, make this all one color now. Down the whole diorama, nice, almost finished. So now with that done, it's time to wrap the diorama in wood so that it'll be firm and it won't flex. But it's so far, so good. This is nice. Control panel's in. I just need to take the front of the control panel here where the foam has oozed through and that comes off real smooth right off the plexiglass. You don't even need a knife. Just use your fingernail and just pull off the excess that foamed the polyurethane foam where it expanded. It comes off really easy. So now I need to cut a piece of wood to fit all the way around this diorama. And so with that next month, we will continue on with part two of this series on constructing this amazing layout that starts out with two shelf sections and then we build the big base and the rest of the scenery. It's gonna be very captivating. So look forward to part two in March 2023's What Sneaked. For this segment of What Sneaked, as we always enjoy having Larry Harrington from Bachman Industries in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania with us on the show to show us some of the new products. And there's so many new products always coming from Bachman Industries. Larry, how are you today? I'm doing wonderful, Ken. How are you doing today? Everything's beautiful. It's just a balmy, 24 degrees and wonderful. Well, it's a little warmer here, but it's still below 50. So that's still considered cold for me. So anyway. Awesome. But it's sunny, so it's not raining. That's not too bad. So yeah, we're always getting new products and from our sample process or actually the production samples. So a couple of things we announced at NMRA and we're at various stages on some of these projects right now. So the first one I wanna show you is kind of unique. We thrive on special paint schemes for locomotives because when you used to do more historical locomotives that were 30, 40, 50 years old, you had many railroads to choose from for decoration. Now as things have consolidated over the years, we're down to a couple major carriers and one major passenger service in the United States. So Amtrak does something a little unique. They don't always repaint their locomotives but they do special wrap applications for certain things. They sometimes they promote events. The last one they did was the King Tut paint wrap for one of the locomotives and they've also done in the past a Coca-Cola wrap and but the latest one was an homage to their phase three paint scheme. It was kind of their anniversary. And here's the, here's that. This is a pre-production sample. How is the glare on the screen okay? Or are we good? It looks fine. It has the cityscape in the background. It was also in conjunction with TrainSim World and we were able to secure all the licensing for this and it turned out to be really nice. Everybody was asking us to do this as soon as it hit the rails. So we initially thought it might be a little more difficult than it was for the, cause there are multiple entities involved with the licensing and we got it. So. Fantastic. We'll see you out shortly. Yeah. Then for a little bit of fun and model railroading we like some fun and model railroading right guys. So this has done really well in our large scale and our HA scale. But now we have the animated stock cars in scale. Nice. See that there'll be three different versions. This is the first test shot we got. This is the horse version. And you can see the head bobble in and out there when it goes around the curves you'll see that happening. We also have a cattle version carrying cows and we all have a special reindeer Christmas car as well. So they're coming along nicely on that and we'll have some decorated samples in the future. So, but people, you know, it's not a prototypical car but it is a fun car and we've sold tremendous amount of them in HA and large scale. The large scale ones are exceptionally cool because there's so much detail in the head figures. So it looks very realistic. And finally, this is a project we're really excited about. We got a lot of good feedback. This is a, we call it the transfer caboose. It's also Missouri Pacific called it something differently. This is, well, we have different details that we could include or not include for different versions. So we have four versions coming out initially. We have the Missouri Pacific prototype. We have the CSX, we have Union Pacific and we have a Southern Pacific. A Southern Pacific one is really a striking paint scheme. It's so bright and they're all nice looking but this is something a little bit unique to the caboose world. And so we hopefully this was used in a lot of yard settings so that the crew could stand on the extended platform and have better visibility when they were doing switching operations. So that's what we have this week to show and hopefully we'll, next month, we'll have even more to show. It's coming up on our beginning of the year and things all reset and we'll start working on it. We already have plans for NMRA but we can't announce those until we get closer but it'll be another exciting year for new products. So our catalog should be out possibly by the time this airs. Yes. And that'll be, show all the new paint schemes that we'll have for existing products. We sometime will reintroduce a few items that were out of the catalog for a couple of years. So that's the time of the year that we do the re-introductions and new paint schemes. NMRA is usually reserved for new tooling or tooling upgrades or feature upgrades. So we should be, we haven't attended yet but we'll first major show of the year will be the Amherst show in Springfield, Massachusetts. Always a great show to go to. Hopefully we'll meet a lot of the customers and get the feedback and that's the most missed thing we've had in the last couple of years because of the COVID situation. We can't, I mean, we do have an email people send us emails but it's nothing like being in person, meeting the the modelers and seeing their passion and what they want us to produce and getting constructive criticism. You know, it's all part of the package and we truly enjoy going to the shows. So Springfield is one of our favorite. It's a very well attended show, usually have over 15,000 people and almost all of those people are modelers. So it's a good show. So looking forward to that. I am looking forward to that as well. I know Denny Yelzma said he's giving away a few hundred what's neat hats at that show to promote our shows. And I really appreciate everything that everybody does for this, the best hobby in the world. And I want to extend that to you as well and Doug Blaine and all the folks out there in Philadelphia because you guys truly come out with some amazing stuff. Couple months ago, we talked about all the Christmas sets that you had in all the scales and it's just amazing what you all do to promote this hobby. Well, the Christmas stuff is a very popular item. It generates that initial love of trains a lot of times because it's the first thing that goes under a Christmas tree. And then that and also our Thomas line are very instrumental in increasing the interest in model reverting. So we have the largest license of Thomas and anybody in the world. We have three scales and also narrow gauge and HO scale. So typically you have four different sizes of locomotives so enrolling stock and as an accessories though we have some new accessories coming out soon. So look forward to seeing those. Absolutely fantastic Larry. So with that guys, that's the end of this February 2023 what's neat. Thank you so much for watching and Larry, thank you very much for participating. Thanks once again for having us. Can have a good day. Hopefully it warms up for you. Perfect. All of the products seen on this episode of what's neat are available from Lombard Hobbies in Lombard, Illinois or order online at LombardHobby.com. Bachman trains. Now that's the way to run a railroad. Check out their website at BachmanTrains.com and by Roka prototype models. We make it real. Check out their website at www.rokamodels.com. Thank you.