Lot’s has happened. Lost my job, and eventually lost our home. We moved in to the new home we’d been building for over 3.5 years in the middle of February 2025. I was “laid-off” due to “restructuring” on February 28, 2025. I’ve been looking since for a new job, and have gone through a bunch of interview cycles — some to the very end — but have yet to find a job. We kept up wth house payments for almost 1/2 a year but we eventually fell behind, and were foreclosed on in May 2026, and had to move out by mid-June 2026.

We’ve been able to move in with a relative for now and I’ve restarted work on UltiThrottle, my Apple platform DCC throttle + app. I had started working on such a project. back in 2020, but just got minor work done on it over the next few years due to being busy contracting and building the house and keeping up with the day job. After the lay-off, I decided to restart the app from scratch, except for the low level Z21 protocol library I had written as part of my original project. I restarted it with SwiftUI and have a working app now. I am working on some iCloud sync issues, and some command station definition and location issues. It works pretty well and supports multiple locomotives at once.

Most of my model railroad stuff is packed away and in storage, but I did keep a bunch of Uni-Track, my DCC stuff, and a half dozen locomotives and a few wagons.

The attached pic is my new test loop I’m using for my app development. The DR5000 has been upgraded with the YaMoRC upgrade kit.