Electrical Standards

Before electrical work begins on the model railroad, electrical standards for how the cabling is going to be constructed need to be defined. Having a standard will help later so that faults can be tracked and it will be easy to know what wires are which. Track Power Feeds These will be 12-gauge cables, red […]

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Standard Turbine Locomotive

Model Railroader magazine has a review of a new Standard Turbine Locomotive. This was an experimental locomotive powered by a gas turbine, which means, it was very loud. Also, they emitted a significant amount of waste heat from the top exhausts, so much so that there are reports of melted bridges when the locomotive would […]

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Walthers Lancaster Farmhouse

The May 2021 Model Railroader had a new product listing. A nice N-scale farmhouse. This would look great next to a farm scene, I just need to figure out where to put it. I’ve always wanted to put a grain elevator on my layout, and there is one near our home, on US85 to Greeley, […]

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Model Railroader April 2021

A new product article on page 13 of this issue, Pullman-Standard lightweight coach, details coaches that made up the Union Pacific City of San Francisco service. The product link is here. This was a passenger service that ran from 1936 through 1971 when Amtrak was formed. Still researching what locomotives pulled this train in my […]

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New Locomotive: General Electric U25B

I just got word of a new N-scale locomotive, the General Electric U25B, available by pre-order from Atlas. This was the first independently developed locomotive from GE, made from April 1959 through February 1966. This fits my time frame. Union Pacific acquired 12 of these locomotives so it would be an appropriate sight on my […]

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Scenery Detail #2: Road Bridge

Adding scenery detail, like a road bridge add interest and also heigh to a model railroad. They are also good for providing scene dividers. A nice example is the image below: The above image shows the very good modeling of a busy and well-used road. If you look at just the road nearest the camera […]

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Track Plan

The design and building of a model railroad depend entirely upon the track plan. As the layout is a model, only a part of the world can be replicated, so the designer has to decide what is important and what can be left out. This page describes the first ideas for my track plan, i.e., […]

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Time Period

Another key component of the design is which time period the model is intended to represent. Generally, these are either steam-era, transition-era (where steam and diesel locomotives are both running), and Diesel-era. The transition period is usually considered to be the 1950s and 1960s. For me, I think steam locomotives are more interesting than Diesel […]

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