Sunday Santa/Christmas Booty

Happy Holidays from the Valley Local! Here's hoping you and yours had a wonderful Christmastime - or whatever holiday you celebrate. As long as you were able to spend some good time with family, as I was, anything else is gravy.

But, that said - what'd Santa bring you?

I got a lot of wonderful things, but here's the railroad-related items, in no particular order...

I expect to be doing a lot more scenery in the new year, and I'm beginning to like working with foam a bit more, so I figured it was high time I got a more versatile foam cutter. I also really enjoyed Lance Mindheim's clinic at the MARPM this year, and his book "Model Railroading as Art" was already something that was on my list since he puts into words a lot of the concepts I've only been toying around with.

In addition to scenery, I also expect to have a lot of structure building in my future so a book on kitbashing will come in especially handy. And even though "the forties" looks black and white to us for the most part (since that's how 99% of the photos look), it's great to have a reference for how things looked back then in color - so the "Classic Railroad Scenes" book will be super helpful.

Finally, and going waaaaaay back to Christmas 1982 when all of this RR stuff started for me, mom & dad got me a book on the Illinois Central RR. Long story short (though you can get the full story here), my great and great-great maternal grandfathers both worked for the IC - the older of the two actually worked the same division as John Luther Jones and knew him as an acquaintance. So it'll be cool to learn some of the history and background of this storied railroad - and get to know a bit more about my grandfathers' jobs way back when.

As I said, I got some other really neat things as well, but this being a railroad blog I figured I'd limit it to railroad stuff.

So - what did YOU get for Christmas?