Get your toy trains ready for the holidays While cleaning out my parents’ attic I found my old trains. Even after I had grown up and moved away, Mom and Dad still used them for years around their Christmas tree. Now, however, my trains have been boxed up and haven’t run for five years. I’d […]
Do you need to camouflage full-size items near your railway? Even though the 12 x 43 feet space in my yard is designated for my garden railway, I must share it with a couple of essential items that are full size, namely the composting bin and a storage bin. Every time I run my trains […]
In the spring of 1936, industrial design guru Raymond Loewy came up with a streamlined winner for the Pennsylvania Railroad’s glamorous Broadway Limited passenger train. Sleek, bullet-nosed, and skirted, Loewy’s upgrading of conventional K4 Pacific 4-6-2 No. 3768 captured the public’s imagination. People lined up to see the locomotive, which was dubbed the “Torpedo.” Learn […]
In 1938, toy maker A.C. Gilbert purchased the American Flyer Manufacturing Co. Production was moved from Chicago to Connecticut (Gilbert was based in New Haven). Gilbert turned the Flyer line upside down in the name of realism. Gone were sheet-metal steam and electric-profile locomotives with brassy trim and oversized features. They were replaced by realistic […]
Four years after the Budd Co.’s Rail Diesel Car made its debut in 1949, Auburn Model Trains announced the first O gauge model. This firm traveled the simplest path in 1953 when it installed a motor inside the shell of one of its streamlined passenger cars. AMT released Rail Diesel Cars in four road names. […]
Jools Holland and his railway empire Like many of you, my interest in model railways started as a young boy. In the Swinging Sixties, my father built me a small layout in our tiny, terraced house in not-particularly-swinging Greenwich on the River Thames in old Southeast London. Over the years I maintained an interest, and […]
I scratchbuilt a large-scale grain elevator in 1:29 scale using PVC pipes, PVC boards, and styrene. To make the silos, I used 4” diameter PVC pipes. After cutting the pipes to the length that I wanted, I drilled holes through each pipe and used 2 threaded bolts to hold them together. The bolts run […]
Prototype locomotives and freight cars have body-mounted couplers, but that hasn’t always been the case on N scale models. Truck-mounted couplers were the standard for many years. Today, almost all N scale locomotives and most newly tooled freight cars have body-mounted N scale couplers. The primary reasons for making the switch from truck-mounted couplers to […]
I must have been 11 or 12 years old when I saw Lionel´s 1938 catalog. I turned to page 16 and saw locomotive 225E at the head of set No. 183E, a three-car freight train, and set No. 182E with three red passenger cars. I fell in love with the locomotive. It wasn’t the Baldwin […]
An N scale layout on a door is to that scale what a 4 x 8-foot table is to HO: a popular and convenient platform on which to build a compact layout. And for good reason. A hollow-core door is a lightweight, rigid surface, easy to handle and build on, and not too expensive. It’s […]
What is ground foam for model railroad layouts? When I first came across this phrase, I thought it was foam that was to be used on the ground, that is, for dirt, grass, and weeds. Then I cottoned on – it’s foam that’s been ground up! So, why would people grind up foam? Well, it […]
Digital Command Control terms you should know: Those of you new to Digital Command Control (DCC), and even those who have a pretty good grasp on the basics, may benefit from a review of DCC terminology. This month we’ll take a look at some of the commonly used terms and their definitions. I’ve divided the […]
