The Crew is back again with more MR goodness! Its an All-Star ensemble cast as David, Rene, Cody, Steve, Eric, and Bryson all share what projects they have been working on. And, of course, we answer more of YOUR questions!
Midday Modeler – March 29, 2023
By Steve Sweeney | March 30, 2023
Video Currently Unavailable
We have received your request for this missing video! We are working on uploading & replacing this file. Please visit the trains.com YouTube page to find other content you may enjoy in the mean time.
When you build your project layouts you use either Digitrax or NCE. I’m sure you use both because both are advertisers and that makes perfect sense. But could you quickly outline the benefits of both and the downsides of both.
Hi Gordon,
We typically try to rotate command control systems on project railroads to keep our toe in the water of products offered by various manufacturers. The MR&T is wired for both NCE and MRC Prodigy. Canadian Canyons and State Line Route are wired for Digitrax. The FreeMo project railroad is also wired with a Digitrax bus, but we also installed the new ESU system on it for testing. We will often rob one system from a previous project railroad and install it on a new one. The workshop test track as one of each system available, so we can swap them around as needed for product testing. Most of these systems are plug-and-play, and they’ll do the same things – it just comes down to personal preference, which can be as subjective as as where the reversing switch is located on a controller. Probably not the answer you’re looking for, but it’s what we do. – David
I bet Jim Hediger would know!
When you did the go around of what everyone did, made me think that perhaps a future episode of Midday could be to take the camera around the building and introduce some of the other offices and magazines that Kalmbach publishes. I recall an early intro to Cody’s Office had him looking at a telescope in the stairwell or something.
Hi Jim,
We don’t have as many magazines as we used to, but we’ve still got quite a few. On the Tracks Group, we’ve got Trains, Classic Trains, Model Railroader, Classic Toy Trains, and Trains.com has replaced MR Video Plus. We also have our two science titles, Astronomy and Discover. And we’ve got Fine Scale Modeler for plastic model kit building. Plus Scale Auto still produces its annual publication – Contest Cars. Thanks for the interest! – D. Popp