Merry Christmas!!!! (and some quick updates)

Ah, almost 6 months since my last post... it's been a very difficult year around our household and families, but we're still here, grace abounds, and there's even time for a bit of modeling.

First off - Merry Christmas!!! 
This is a time of friends, family, holiday food, and hopefully some time off.  But there is the unexpected buried in all of that - the very concept of God cleaning up our mess, knowing we'd spit in His face and treat His child like trash.

I think C.S. Lewis often has expressed it best, such as this quote:
“Everyone thinks forgiveness is a lovely idea until he has something to forgive.”
― C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity

There are more wonderful quotes here:
https://www.goodreads.com/work/quotes/801500-mere-christianity
 

RGS Charter on the Cumbres and Toltec next fall
The C&TS is planning to reletter one of their locomotives and run an RGS recreation in September.  Should be amazing, and there's talk of some special visitors of RGS equipment from various other places.  Details are here -
http://www.coloradonewmexicosteamtrain.org/FriendsForum/viewtopic.php?f=64&t=4152

Structures it is...
For one reason or another I've found it hard to work on the layout proper - I had a couple operating sessions early in 2016 (wonderful!), got good feedback, and proceeded to cut the mainline for a new turnout, and then got a ballasting bug and ended up painting and ballasting track on the entire layout.  Next up is static grass on some areas in and near the track, then cleaning and finishing trackwork to get things running again.  And, well, there it sits for the moment.

But, I also got a bug to curl up at my hobby desk upstairs, and start working through some structures.
I've always been a big fan of Banta Modelworks, and decided I'd tackle these Ridgway shop buildings -
http://www.bantamodelworks.com/BMW122.htm
 
Here's some of the results... adapting and adding a few detail tidbits per historical photos.  As you can see, I've added interiors and lighting to most of the buildings.  These aren't quite finished - I'll hopefully post the final results at some future point.

Dolores Flour and Feed Mill
Then, after digging through a lot of the RGS history books I have, I latched onto starting the strucures for my model of Dolores, beginning with the flour mill (which presentingly is just an empty spot beside the spur on the layout, with a little sign noting optimiscally that it's actually a mill - or will be).  So, I dug around and found this kit, which I purchased as a starting point - the LaserKit model of the Hitzeman Mill
http://www.laserkit.com/laserkit.htm

But I'm adapting to look (mostly) like the prototype:

 My adaptation is based on a my needs for operation (like a large loading area), as well as some compromises on how far I go in adapting the base kit. So, here's the results so far... again it's not quite finished.

And operating session photos!
I'll finish with some photos from an op session back in January 2016.