Model Railroad Hobbyist | March 2015 | #61 ASSISTANT EDITOR Don Hanley editorial Getting Unstuck It happens to every one of us – we come to a point in the construction of our layout or operations on the layout where things don’t work, and we are stuck. Ideas that we thought would work don’t. The switching of a town or industry doesn’t work the way envisioned. Often the ideas that we put down on paper are missing something. A contractor once told me “nothing messes up a set of plans like reality,” as he was pointing out a problem with a project I was in charge of. So what do you do when you get stuck, when reality rears its ugly head and progress comes to a standstill? You discover that some part of your layout don’t work very well, or worse, not at all. The first thing I do is to step away from the problem. Often it is just a simple matter of taking time to clear my mind and then later come back to study why something isn’t working. I would say that this works 75%-80% of the time. In these instances, I come up with a new or different way of doing a particular task. I find occasions where a specialty item or tool is needed. Those times I take the opportunity to clean up and look around to MRHMAG.COM • TABLE OF CONTENTS • INDEX