Development of my model railroad
The August 2021 issue of Model Railroader has a review of an upcoming release of an EMD NW2. This is an early Diesel locomotive built in the late 1940s and early 1950s. A few are still running today. I placed a pre-order with Walthers.
Read moreBefore 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 […]
Read moreModel 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 […]
Read moreThe 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, […]
Read moreA 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 […]
Read moreThis was reviewed in the December 2019 Model Railroader Magazine and is now available on the web from Broadway Limited Imports. These were 1910s era locomotives, but some still served until the end of the steam era, the late 1950s. As such, the Union Pacific version is a reasonable option for my time period. This […]
Read moreI 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 […]
Read moreAdding 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 […]
Read moreThe 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., […]
Read moreAnother 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 […]
Read more