How to model realistic track and roadbed
by Pelle Søeborg
Follow along as the author shares his favorite tips for building a good-looking and smooth-running right-of-way. He describes how to cut and install cork roadbed, lay flextrack and turnouts, and provides a simple method for painting and weathering. Although he's laying HO scale track, these techniques will apply to any modeling scale.
Animate structures with microcontrollers
by Bruce Kingsley
With the availability of low-cost Arduino microcontrollers, layout structures can be transformed from having simple interior illumination to a structure that comes to life. My first structure using an Arduino simply turned room lights on and off randomly. For this project, I used an Arduino board to do more by adding animated lights, sounds, and figures to a small HO scale home.
Drawings of a steam era interlocking tower
by Harold Russell
This Lehigh Valley RR interlocking tower once sat diagonally across from the station at Rochester Junction, N.Y., adjacent to a wye that served the branch to Honeoye Falls, N.Y. The wye was used to turn the gas-electric car that ran to Rochester.
I had visited this area once before to study and draw the station [published in the June 1990 Model Railroader], but at that time, the tower was already gone. However, I later acquired more information about the tower, in the form of some old photos and a plan of a similar tower that was published in Flags, Diamonds, and Statues magazine, the publication of the Anthracite Railroads Historical Society (www.anthraciterailroads.org).
A bridge line in HO scale
by Lou Sassi
Larry Hickman began work on his dream layout, the 28 x 38-foot HO scale River Falls & Eastern, in November 1999. But his journey in model railroading started decades earlier. The retired professional railroader, whose father and step-grandfather were also railroaders, received a Marx layout when he was 6 years old. The track was attached to a 4 x 6 sheet of wood that conveniently slid under his bed when not in use.
Low riders on the Sandy River
by Lou Sassi
The author modified the boxcars on his Sandy River & Rangely Lakes On30 layout with inspiration from an old magazine article.
The article, by Bob Hayden, was in the May-June 2008 issue of the Narrow Gauge and Shortline Gazette. Bob’s technique for altering the boxcars was to grind away the bolsters and replace them with various thicknesses of styrene strip stock. He also cut off the Bachmann draft-gear boxes and installed Kadee no. 5 couplers in their stead.
Building from memory
by Dave Rickaby
John Mueller models the C&NW in the 1950s in a freelanced version of northern Wisconsin. His choice of eras lets him run both steam power and the Electro-Motive Division F3s, F7, and GP7 diesels he watched on his camping trips. To him, first-generation diesels had so much character that they were a must for his railroad. Also appealing about this time period were the pulpwood gondolas and the cabooses.