John Brennan’s Chicago, Peoria & Western Canton Branch

Cab view of model railroad

Owner: John Brennan Prototype Modeled: Interchange with EJ&E, IC , CB&Q Reporting Marks: CP&W Layout Era: Sept. 1940 Theme: Midwestern Scale: HO The railroad is an overlay of the CB&Q from Chicago staging to Galesburg staging. There are 23 trains scheduled in three-hour session on a 4 to 1 fast clock. Power is almost exclusively […]

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Layout Tour – Willoughby Line with Guy Cantwell

Model town of Willoughby

This HO scale masterpiece is a double-deck proto-lance 1950s-era layout built by Guy Cantwell that represents parts of California’s central valley, as well as the railroads that operated in the Sierra foothills and mountains. It features prototypes from the Southern Pacific, Western Pacific/Tidewater Southern, Sierra, Hetch Hetchy, Yosemite Valley Railroad, and West Side Railroads. Most […]

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Custom HO scale Aerotrain – 1950s movie and how it was made

Model of aerotrain locomotive

A 1950s-style documentary of my HO scale Aerotrain locomotive and observation car. Now a fully DCC and sound operational locomotive, it started out as a 1960s Bowser “toy” shell. Except for the shell, all parts came from other HO and O gauge part sources and many were custom made. Though not my best work at […]

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JLWII2000 Video: Athearn Genesis HO EMD SD70M

Athearn Genesis HO EMD SD70M box

    In this exclusive video for Model Railroader from James Wright of the JLWII2000 YouTube channel, you’ll see highlights of the superdetailed HO scale SD70M from Athearn Trains. Part of the firm’s Genesis series, the diesel locomotive model features a SoundTraxx Tsunami2 Digital Command Control (DCC) sound decoder. […]

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Gunter’s HO/HOe model railroad

H0/H0e layou

This video features a visit to the H0/H0e layout of my friend Gunter in Austria. The home layout is about 10 square meters large, analog operation with working overhead catenary. This allows two trains to run simultaneously on a single track. The layout requires three persons for realistic operation. During the video shooting, we had […]

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Computer-aided model railroad – Logging in Sacramento Mountains

Screen shot of CAD software

“Computer-aided model railroad” uses the computer not only to help run an HO scale model railroad but also adds customer ship orders to make it feel real. A customer database is used to generate scheduled and unscheduled ship releases to the days activities. This video demonstrates how this is accomplished logging in the Sacramento Mountains […]

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