Your friend does a really good job with his scenery. That sawmill building looks really good.
Sawmills and logging trains seem to be one of the favorite themes for a lot of model railroaders. You can really add a lot of detail to the scenery, and it's an interesting period in the history of logging and lumber production.
Yes, I was really impressed by his work. There are a lot of older car models and buildings that look nice too. It is a fun time period in history to make a model of. At least in this country a lot of the railroads seem to be in a decline in use more recently.
Yes, there just isn't very many branch lines in use these days. It's all mainline railroading now, container trains and bulk commodity trains moving cross country, very little in the way of local train traffic. Apparently, it's just no longer cost effective for the railroads to do local runs like they had 50 years ago.