Endless Summer?

One question I get asked from time to time is "why don't you build a winter layout?" Well that's a no brainer. Model railroading for many of us, myself included is kind of an escape from our daily lives. And since most of my model railroading activity occurs in the winter months, where even here in the Palmetto State, the world is a grey, bleak, depressing wasteland; why on Earth would I want to model it? Frankly, I'd much rather come upstairs, flip on the lights and see my favorite part of Pennsylvania on a summer day, and it's warm.

Also, part of the reason I chose this area to model was I spent many a happy hour railfanning there with my dad. And always during the summer. So the summer setting is definitely evocative of those memories.

Now that said, I did briefly toy with the idea of doing an autumn-themed layout with all the brightly colored foliage. However, that would've required making hundreds of different color puffball trees. I never would have made this amount of progress if I'd modeled the fall.