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Last week I had three comments that lead me to think that some of you may not know how the store works, or may be intimidated by it. Fear not, you can not break the store. Feel free to poke around in it! The best way to find an item is to go to the catalog tab, and then select the collection that the item is in. Art is in 'Art and Specialties' and depots are in 'HO Structures' for example. The collections are intended to be simple and logical, so wrong guesses should be rare and they are not fatal....

We have added a new depot model, the Manitoba two story depot of 1887. These were built only in 1887, most in North Dakota, some in Minnesota and a few in Montana. The second story was living quarters for the agent and his family. They were placed at frontier stations where housing was scarce or unavailable. Many survived into the 1950s and a few made it to the BN merger of 1970.

We have five paintings by noted Seattle area artist J. Craig Thorpe now in the store. Subjects are: W-1 5018 West picking up orders at Scenic Y-1 5011 West with 1947 Empire Builder at Gaynor F-3 350C West with 1955 Empire Builder on Stone Arch bridge R-2 2049, W-1 5018, and F-3 352-C at Skykomish GP-9 724 East at Sheep Creek, Montana   Each image is a high quality giclee print on 11x14 paper, with unprinted margin of .75 inch to fit a standard 11x14 inch frame, without matte. They will also fit a standard 12x16 inch frame with a...

Grain, predominately wheat, was the traffic that paid the Great Northern's bills, and that grain was loaded into box cars at country elevators. Finally, after about a year's development work, and a series of photos taken by Darin Nelson, we have an accurate model of the 20,000 bushel elevator built in 1913 at Touhey WA. Elevators of this basic design existed at virtually every Manitoba and Great Northern station in Minnesota west of Willmar at St. Cloud, North Dakota, South Dakota, Montana east of the Rocky Mountains, and eastern Washington. If you model the Great Northern in any of these...

These cars by InterMountain fill a hole in our offerings and your roster! The prototype cars were bought by GN to haul commercial coal from Superior WI to destinations well into Montana. The coal from Superior was 'Pittsburg seam' coal used for both domestic heating and industrial purposes.  While the Superior coal dock is too large for most of us to model, consignee facilities are not. We offer the Andrew Kolb coal shed from Melrose MN and the Lunde Coal Elevator from Langdon ND, both of which were designed to receive coal from box cars, but later would have received...