Repairing older N scale handrails: Back in the early days of N scale – the 1970s and ’80s – most N scale diesel locomotives had oversized handrails. In fact, they were often so outlandish we called them stovepipes. N-scalers have always been a clever bunch, and this was just one of the colorful and humorous […]
Running N scale trains too fast: Several years ago the N scale Enthusiast national convention came to town, and I was very pleased that, over the course of one day, four busloads of N scalers from all over the world came to my house to visit my layout. My friends Andy Sperandeo and Gordy Spiering […]
Thoughts on detailing N scale diesels: I really enjoy modifying locomotives and adding or subtracting details to make them more closely represent specific prototypes. I’m most interested in my Santa Fe and Southern Pacific engines, but hope someday to also get to the engines from other lines that turn up on my N scale circa […]
The best N scale tools: I’m going to write about what might be called “second-echelon” tools, that’s to say the tools you begin accumulating after you’ve been in the hobby awhile and have the basic tools you really can’t do without. The following is a short list of the some of the best N scale […]
How to keep N scale piggybacks on track: My N scale Tehachapi Pass layout is set in 1985. Intermodal railroading was well established, but on nothing like the scale we see today. Most intermodal traffic in the pass was TOFC (trailer-on-flatcar), more commonly called “pigs,” short for piggybacks. For my money there’s nothing much less […]
Bombardier LRC diesel locomotives were built for the future using beloved Alco components of old. “From the tip of its pointed nose to its electric tail-end markers, the LRC locomotive is refreshingly different, but at heart it is nothing more than a third-generation FPA,” wrote Greg McDonnell in the July 1983 issue of […]
A handy N scale uncoupler: If you’re a model railroader, everywhere you go your antennae are out, scanning your environs for anything that might be useful to build with. And that leads me to swizzle sticks. I was having lunch with a tableful of in-laws at Maggiano’s Little Italy, a popular chain with a restaurant […]
Delaware & Hudson history dates from 1823, when the Delaware & Hudson Canal Co. was chartered to build a canal from Honesdale, Pa., to Rondout, N. Y., on the Hudson River. The canal would carry anthracite coal from mines near Carbondale, Pa., to New York City. The mines would be served by a gravity railroad […]
The Southern Pacific locomotive roster was expansive. A headlight breaking the horizon in the 1960s meant one thing; you never were sure what the motive power would be. In its latter years, despite having hundreds of Electro-Motive Division Geeps and SDs and General Electric U-Boats of all models, SP would assemble whatever was available on […]
There were more than 200 red-white-and-blue Bicentennial diesel locomotives. Many “Bicens” were specially renumbered, but some (the 76s, 200s, 1776s, 1976s, etc.) were not. Bicentennials roamed the rails in every state (beyond the “lower 48” were two Alaska Railroad FP7s and a rail historical group’s tiny GE in Hawaii); in Panama (a 5-foot-gauge Alco RSC3); […]
Delaware & Locomotive locomotives demonstrated some of the greatest variety for a railroad its size. Steam locomotives on the D&H were distinctive. Its roster was dominated by 2-8-0 and 4-6-0 types, but it also had notable fleets of 4-6-2s, 4-8-4s, and 4-6-6-4s. After World War I, the road stuck with the 2-8-0 long […]
Pennsylvania 6200 turbine locomotive was an experimental locomotive that served on passenger trains in Indiana and Ohio. But it is perhaps best known as the Lionel No. 671 Pennsylvania Turbine. The first of several turbine projects the Pennsylvania considered was also the only one that produced an actual locomotive: steam-turbine-mechanical No. 6200. Pennsy […]
