Ed invited me (again) to his house for a tour of his PRR 2-rail layout. All I can say is "I'm not worthy"!
What a work of art Ed has accomplished. I visited with him maybe 3 years ago and at that time I believe most of the track was in place but little scenery. Since then the man has been prolific in his tree building. Must be a couple of thousand trees on his layout, the scenery is not overdone, but looks well done and fits the layout nicely.
Ed invited me to run a couple of trains, a long passenger train and I also switched a coal drag pulled by one of his 2-8-0s, using his DCC system. The sounds were incredible and the movement of the engines was as good as anything I've seen with any of the command systems in O. The slow speed while switching and the speeds I ran with the passenger train were as good as it gets. The system, while complex, was very easy to grasp in the short time I was there (aka, didn't cause any wrecks!).
In addition to the scenery, Ed has some fantastic buildings and scenes around the layout. Some buildings I recognized as OGR Ameritowne kits and others were from older, out of production companies, and scratch built. The track work was awesome, hand laid turnouts in addition to a few Atlas turnouts, thousands of feet of track, lbs/tons of ballast, and some of the most well thought out, engineered, framework I've ever seen. It's so big he has to make adjustments for contraction/expansion!!! Some of his features, such as hidden walkways to access certain areas, must have taken a lot of time to engineer.
I wish I had brought my camera, but my photo taking is worse than my modeling, hopefully a magazine will contact Ed about doing another article (He had his old layout published a few years ago).
In addition to running trains we spent time just talking about trains and the state of model railroading in general.
2-rail layouts need more exposure to the modeling public. While Ed has done an amazing job with his PRR empire (his basement is as big or bigger than my entire house!) it's not impossible to build a 2-rail layout in a smaller space. My current 3-rail empire is in a 12x12 room, I could easily make the same track plan in 2-rail and after seeing Eds I'm getting closer to pulling up the stakes and going that route. I already have 1 2-rail engine and actually ran a 3-rail MTH 2-8-0 (with my recent battery-powered RC system installed) on his code 148 2-rail track. I believe all my 3-rail engines will run on code 148 2-rail track (electronics aside).
Kudos to Ed for a great Thursday of running/talking trains (and enjoyed the pizza) 
(PLEASE GET THIS LAYOUT PUBLISHED 
)
