Sam Novello of Atkinson, New Hampshire, has quite an impressive train set in his basement. Sam started building his 20 by 20 foot HO guage layout back in 1992 and watched it grow piecemeal over the years without any overall plan. Now he's getting ready to take it down and start over again, this time following a plan. He told us that the current layout, representing various aspects of New England, will stay up at least until April of this year when Model Railroader magazine is scheduled to visit his basement world to do an artical on his creation.

Some of the buildings and other parts of his minature world were built from kits, but Sam built many of the buildings from scratch. In fact, Sam builds some buildings, covered bridtes, and the like for sale. One of the things we noticed while attending his open house was a diminutive copy of the fisherman monument from Gloucester made with a button and an old toy soldier. Sam is not the only model railroad hobbiest we know, but his creation is one of the best we've seen.