Your golden-era model railroads!

Nope, he's a flatlander Yankee taking shots for some big time magazine up north...

 

There were more than a few train fans ranging around the US with camera in tow, not to mention the government photographers going here and there taking photos during the war.
Jack Delano from the OWI was a well-known example of this. He took great b/w and color photos of all kinds of stuff, including a lot of train photos: https://www.shorpy.com/jack-delano-photos

 

I've been very stressed from work and a lot of home improvement we've done lately (had most of the interior repainted and the house re-roofed this past week), so I haven't gotten to the layout much.
Still, last night, my wife and I added new lighting to the layout room, with a large LED and 4 'cans', 2 each on a rail sticking out from each side, pointed at various places. Though it's not as good as a full LED track over the entire layout, it's still a big improvement over the original single room light from when we had the house built!




This shows the different lighting when a can is pointed toward a scene:

 

I was playing around with my cell phone camera last night, looking at the new lighting in the room...

 

At the end of the day in the Stoney Creek valley area, on a lazy summer's evening in 1943:

 

I was in CO state until yesterday, riding every train I could, including the Royal Gorge, the Cumbres & Toltec, the Silverton and even getting a 'cab' ride on a galloping goose at the CO RR museum!


As for the layout, I fired it up an hour ago and ran a train down to Buladeen, TN and back.
I also had to get a good mood shot:

 

On a lazy summer's evening along Stoney Creek, the air raid warden ambles up, about to tell Mister Grindstaff to black out those lights, as you just never know when German bombers might show up to rearrange the farm land of Northeast Tennessee...

Over at the Unaka Company barrel factory, the swing shift has just arrived and the later shift has left for the evening. Only a little pup is left to wait for his 'people' to come back out so they can head home:

 

The chimney on the Buladeen Depot never looked right to me. I had placed it on the roof when it was separate from the building at the time, not realizing I'd placed it directly above a window on that wall until the roof went back on. That had always bugged me. So, I yanked the chimney out last night, filled the hole in the roof, and placed it over at the end of the structure, by the area where the freight would be stored and near a corner that seemed likely place for a fireplace. I know it's low on the roof to create a good draft, but pretty much anywhere else, the bottom of the fireplace would in the wrong spot, conflicting with a door or window. A little bit of paint work, and I think it looks okay. You can see where the patch was, and maybe someday I might just replace the entire roof, but it's good for now.

 

More random shots at a few of my places on the layout.

Night time at the Unaka factory, making barrels into the wee hours of the morning:



Twilight down at Grindstaff’s store at Sadie, Tennessee. The old folks are going to have to break up their armchair general discussions of the war, “across the water” and head home if they want any supper tonight!

 

I recently realized I’m at the 5th anniversary of the start of the layout.

So, here we are on August 18, 2014, the first train reaches the opposite end of the line. Only 6 days before, the first train moved on about 3 feet of track at the other end:







5 years later, the same spot (and same locomotive):

 

Last night, 5 years ago to the hour, I took a 'now' photo compared to the first time anything ran on the layout.

There wasn't much track beyond the camera's view at the time. A friend with an HO layout was helping my lay track and wire it all into place (as I hadn't built a layout in many years before that) and he insisted we temporarily hook up some leads to the rails to run something. I'm just glad I got a photo of it then.

 

5 years exactly to the hour for the very first train ran to each end of the layout (the turntables weren't in yet, though), re-created last night with the same locomotive/cars matched as good as I could to the location and camera angle:



Here is the 'now' photo in b/w:

 

I don't model the N&W, so I wouldn't be re-creating anything he took.
That said, I have done several night shots over the years: