News & Products for the week of August 21st 2023 Model railroad operators and builders can get the latest information about locomotives, freight cars, passenger cars, tools, track, and more by reading Model Railroader’s frequent product updates. The following are the products Model Railroader editors have news on for the week of August 21st […]
Meet Jerry Dziedzic What was your first train set (or locomotive)? How about three, in different scales? Like so many youngsters, a Lionel circle around the tree greeted me one Christmas morning. I suppose this was in 1956 or 1957. My dad had fun, too. He used two sheets of plywood to build an 8 […]
See what you’re really modeling: Does this ever happen to you? You’re driving down a street you’ve gone down a hundred times before and you notice a particular house for the first time. “Where the heck did that come from?” you’re wondering. My point is we can look right at things and not really see […]
Derailments of the curious kind: Several months ago, my operations chief Gordy Spiering and I were orbiting a couple trains on my N scale layout for a group of visitors and the same boxcar kept derailing at the west end switch in the town of Tehachapi. In a situation like that the show must go […]
An N scale loading ramp for Bakersfield: In 1979, Jim FitzGerald, remembered fondly by many of us N scalers as Mr. Ntrak, introduced me to the Tehachapi Loop and its environs, and my model railroading fate was sealed forever. I wrote a remembrance of Jim in the May 2014 Model Railroader for my N Scale […]
Tips for Body-mounted couplers on auto racks: When N scale got its start in Europe in the 1960s, its originators conceived it in the tradition of toy trains, with truck-mounted couplers that could negotiate sharp-radius curves. Some N-scalers began switching to body-mounts after Kadee introduced its N scale knuckle coupler in the early 1960s. (Kadee […]
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Q: I’m planning a small layout based on The Bay Line (BAYL), a north Florida short line, focusing on the Cottondale diamond crossing and CSX interchange. I found a fascinating picture of the diamond near the interchange in 1989, which shows a grade crossing-type gate across the railroad track just before the diamond. What would the […]
Q: I’ve been given several HO scale locomotives that unfortunately came without boxes or information about whether they were DCC equipped or not. Most are very nice, higher end models, not entry-level. Is there any way to safely find out if each locomotive is DC or DCC without taking off the shells? Even if I do remove […]
By Toyoji Sekine / Photos by Kaori Komatsu In the 1950s, when I was a small child, an O gauge train ran around the pond in my yard. It was a Japanese-style train made of tinplate, as nothing more realistic was available after the war. But I fell in love with American railroads, particularly the […]
Why horseshoe curves work better in N scale: Caliente, Calif., is a little town on the Union Pacific between Bakersfield and Tehachapi. Fans of the railroad’s Tehachapi Pass know Caliente for its horseshoe curve; the rest of the world likely has never heard of it. If you’re modeling Tehachapi Pass, as I am, Caliente will […]
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