I installed the just released Digitrax decoders in my Kato F3 AB units.

FYI: The train board is located in the middle of a den surrounded by computer furniture, plants, a sofa and chair, a coat rack, a laundry area, and lots of windows. It's a tight squeeze in this room, but it allows me to work on all sides of the layout. Adding a backdrop now would make no sense. I've retouched some images to remove the background clutter.

I started by organizing all my trees by size and type and selecting my favorites. (Less than optimal trees will make good density fillers for forest areas.) Since my home and business areas are high visibility areas I wanted to start there with my best stuff. Planting trees in those areas required drilling through the plastic bases with a 5/32" drill bit and gluing the trees. I ended up using Aleene's Original "Tacky Glue" to attach all the trees... it's a thick white glue.

It took me a while to get started on this phase. Adding trees is one of those major layout milestones that require planning. I always had basic tree areas in mind from day one. Until you actually plant the trees you really don't know how line of site views are affected. This is one area I'm really taking my time on. I'm only planting about a dozen trees a session and not trying to create a thick grouping all at once.

Adding trees... Session 1 . I had always planned to have trees behind the town businesses so I started by planting a line there. My homes would require trees and bushes so I planted a few to start. I took these photos before the glue had dried to make sure I was happy with their placement... so pardon the temporary white globs.

Adding trees... Session 3. More trees are added to the woodsy area by the hill and brown house. The farm gets a tree in the back. Bushes are added here and there by the school house and more tree bulk is added by the white house. Start of the 'forest' by the curve near the coal facility.

Here are a few comparison shots between sessions. What a difference the trees make. I especially like 'Looking west Session3" compared to similar shots in the previous galleries. Wow.

Adding trees... Sessions 4-7. As I continue foresting areas I will post the progress. Need more trees, they sure go fast! Please excuse the masking tape covering the switches.

Adding trees... Sessions 8-11. More trees were added to the layout. I also began including fall colors for variety to new areas as well as adding a few here and there in previous areas. Way back in Gallery 1 ( April/May 2003 ) I left some orange/yellow foliage debris around the tracks in back of the town and around the farm area curve. With the addition of trees with fall colors the debris now appears as fallen leaves and makes perfect sense. I hope to be able to remove the masking tape on the switch machines and run some trains soon. Unfortunately some of my favorite line of site shots are now history... guess this means I'll be searching for new shot spots. I've also included a sessions map plotting the planned tree landscaping areas.

Finally got to run some of my trains again! Things are looking really nice with the addition of the trees. The trains are close to scraping a tree branch here and there but there are no problems. I used some of my old Rivarossi heavyweight passenger cars as clearance guides while planting the trees. I tried my Kato smoothside passenger cars and they work perfect also. I powered up the street lighting and enjoyed some (dangerous) night running with my son. Now that I have a second controller it makes things interesting for him also.

Pulled out the camera after the late night run with my son and took a few shots. Not much control when doing dark environments with my camera. The auto focus is a real challenge to get it to allow a shot even with the slow flash setting. Some of the shots were kinda neat so I'm posting them...

Adding trees... Sessions 12-17. I went ahead and re-grassed and foliaged the four layout corners and completed adding all of the trees. I went back and changed session 14 area trees to Poplars and ran a few of those along the west rim of the layout also. I've run out of room to post everything for March on this site and will continue in Gallery 6 which includes some shots of my new decoder equipped LL SW9/1200 as well as more overviews of the layout.

Here are a few more comparison shots between sessions of the west side of the layout where the town is located. The last shot is after all the sessions were completed. (3rd photo is new for March)

More March photos in Gallery 6!