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They don't have flywheels. They do have all-wheel electrical pickup, and pretty good slow-speed performance, but there isn't much room for a flywheel in a 44 tonner chassis. The ones you can buy new now are all single-motor DCC-ready ones, the older ones (common on the used market) are...

One thing you might consider, instead of 15 or 18 inch radius EZ-track, is getting some flextrack and using that for your curves. Flextrack allows for smoother curves, can be fit to whatever radius you need, and has far fewer joints between pieces of track, which means fewer places for...

Front and rear wheels don't make much difference in terms of traction, but they do make a difference as to the realism of a locomotive's setting. Typically a loco with no pilot or trailing wheels would be found in a yard, rather than out on the mainline pulling grades. Era is important...

Looks a bit like what phone phreaks call a "beige box" or lineman's handset: clip the clips to a phoneline and use the built-in dial to make a call. I assume this is even simpler, with only a direct line to speak to the dispatcher.

There are still cabeese in train sets because people still like cabeese. Just about every freight train I see going by includes cars from many different railroads, some of which are no longer around but they haven't been repainted since the last merger, or the merger before that. It's nothing...

Best advice I can give for the Bachmann is to take out the little lucite rod and the bulb in the middle and replace them with any off-the-shelf directional lighting kit. It will look better and you'll decrease the minimum turning radius to about 8-9" without having to alter the frame (if you...

One thing to keep in mind is that even the 1910 era doodlebugs were stealing an older idea--from electric interurban cars! They were powered by electric overhead or third rail (like subways and LRVs today) instead of carrying their own power plant. The modern interpretation of the doodlebug is...

Sounds a lot more feasible...I just plain don't do the South Bay at all--other than Berkeley and SF itself I'm pretty much lost in the Bay Area. Which might be disaster waiting to happen, as I'm going to be out in Livermore for the WPRRHS meet in a couple of weeks!

okay, this is true...a bit more convenient from the South Bay.

Russ Bellinis: That would make the most sense--take Amtrak to Richmond, Bart to Caltrain, and Caltrain to Palo Alto. Kind of a lot of time on the train, admittedly...but maybe that's okay. I suppose you could also take Amtrak to Emeryville, then the Amtrak bus to San Francisco (included in the...

If you have a full 8 hours, and are willing to take a ride, take BART from the airport to the Richmond/Amtrak station, take the Amtrak Capitol Corridor train to Sacramento (which takes around 90 minutes), walk two blocks from the Amtrak station to the California State Railroad Museum, spend a...

There really isn't any of that left in San Francisco. If you like old streetcars you can catch the PCCs, Peter Witts and other old cars on the Market Street F-line, but other than Caltrain I don't think there is much in the way of freight rail left in the city of San Francisco. Even the old...

The length of the cars doesn't always gauge how sharp of curves they can manage--that depends more on mechanism and wheel clearance. Although the fact that they're only 6-3/4" long is a good hint that they don't demand broad curves.

Indeed, I think a few people are missing that MCD4x4 is building a subway layout, not a steam/diesel layout, which means that he doesn't have to worry about pulling long trains, and he doesn't have conventional passenger-layout worries about 80-foot cars on sharp curves. In fact, it might be...

That's the one mentioned in the OP...I didn't have to watch a slideshow, I could see the smoke from my house. The Arcade Trestle collapse was pretty dramatic, but that was in the fifties--passenger service was long gone and the SN had a gaggle of diesels, as well as what they could borrow...

When and where was that trestle fire? The most dramatic trestle event I know about on the SN was the collapse of the Arcade Trestle in the 1950s, thanks to a too-heavy steel train, that ended electrification in that segment of the line.

If you're dead set on 4x8 land, then the inside track of your two-track mainline will have to be 15" radius curves. So, here it is...I scooted the track away from the edges, since the layout has walls on two sides--if you butt the track up against the wall you won't have room for the train (the...

They are called Atlas Snap-Switches. That's the name in the Atlas catalog. If you are using Atlas RTS software, the names for the products in the store are the same as the names of the pieces you are using in the program. If you're going to fit a double-tracked loop AND a ramp upward to the...

ahhh, my HO scale is showing! The other points remain the same...out west, you see more brownish ties than black, but maybe that's just becasue UP doesn't do a whole lot of track maintenance.

Well, there weren't any coal trains (we don't really get those in California) and the fire was right next to a river, so fire-boats were dispatched which could pump river water directly onto one end of the fire, and land-based fire units were able to set up serial pumper trucks to get water from...