In the Bay Area...resuming the hobby after a...long hiatus!
Modeling a rough area of the Bay Area from Emeryville north and east. Protos in that area are / were ATSF, BNSF, SP and UP as well as Amtrak. I'll be doing a combo of those since the tracks I'm "loosely" modeling are shared by all.
I am a GIS professional by day, and have actually spent some work down-time adjusting 100k map data for the rails in this area to be more spatially accurate. It also has been an interesting way of seeing how all the real stuff can/does fit together and some of the really strange things that are done with rails. The map data has been adjusted to an imagery layer and cross referenced with Google Maps (better imagery and data over-all).
I'm building my current layout in the garage at my apartment (single car but deep and fairly wide). Since it is an apartment I know it isn't permanent and will have to eventually move with me to a hopefully larger space!
I have old gear I unpacked that was wrapped in 1980 newspapers, but I'll be using all new track and mostly new electronics. Back then DCC wasn't much of a thing so now I'm learning that side.
I look forward to interacting with the group!