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I am a great fan of the WRM. I live in Sacramento, and recently completed a book on the Sacramento streetcar system based largely on the photographs and research materials found at the Western Railway Museum (in fact, profits from the book are being donated to preserve WRM's Sacramento cars like...

Most of the coming year's work will involve prepping my new basement room for the layout: insulating and finishing the exterior wall, adding reinforcing straps to connect the floor joists to the cripple wall and other structural bits of the house, and then installing the shelf brackets around...

Sometimes a short line that does a lot of transfer business is actually owned by a larger Class 1 railroad. Belt lines often did a lot of transfer business: one of the more informative bits I found in researching the Sacramento Northern's belt line here in Sacramento was a chart showing major...

iis612: that's just nowadays...BNSF used to be several different railroads that had one end in Chicago in the transition era (ATSF, Great Northern, Northern Pacific), as did UP (SP, UP, many more) plus a large number of interurban electric and steam/diesel powered passenger lines that handled...

if we're talking steam locomotives, generally you can't go wrong with black...

She may have just wanted to make sure that it actually existed and you weren't spending all those hours at a shady dive bar...

The whole idea of a double-ended locomotive is that it can be operated in both directions, in order to avoid having to turn a locomotive. For purposes of control via a powerpack, "forward" is the same as for a single-ended locomotive: the way the locomotive goes when power is applied. when...

Lots to learn there! Chicago was (and is) pretty much the railroad hub of the nation--I don't even know offhand how many major railroads had one end in Chicago, but it was a lot!

4x8s are okay if you have the room and the funds.

It seems like segues into monstrous mechanical storage systems kind of defeats the purpose of the original poster's question on how to turn a train in minimal space. A three-foot or four-foot "whole train" turntable seems kind of silly: why not just build a reversing loop if you have a...

Narrow-gauge cars did tend to look very precariously perched on the rails: one reason why a lot of Colorado narrow-gauge locomotives look so low-slung is because they had to be to keep their center of gravity low! The SR&RL and other 2-foot railroads had to be big enough to fit full-sized people...

Operating a switching layout isn't really much different from doing switching on any other sort of layout. Exactly how one is operated depends on what sort of layout you have. The "Timesaver," as mentioned above, is a puzzle (the original was simply mounted on a board) and not a model railroad...

Personally I'd make a lift-out or swing-out bridge in Section 3. It would mean an extra support leg and some carpentry, but fewer bumps of the head!

One thing about this "under the bed" discussion: how many of you have a bed bigger than 8 feet long?? Module width is a sticky issue. The "common" module size is 2x4 feet, but there is no need to stick to that. Personally I prefer a one-foot thickness, even for yards: that's enough for four...

Neat! Looks like a beautiful car.

The top speed of a model locomotive doesn't have to have anything to do with the top speed of its appropriate prototype--if the locomotive you got was a cheap toy-train type of locomotive it will have a top scale speed of a couple hundred miles per hour even if it is a model of a switching...

Diesel now, but the idea is to end up electric.

By Aussie/Euro standards 3.5 by 7 feet is a comfortably spacious layout--it's almost a 4x8! It is of course possible to get lots of detail and lots of interesting operation and scenery in a small layout. I couldn't find a track plan or overall shot, which is, I think, a smart choice: if you saw...

It is certainly possible to use four-sided waybills to route empties to other industries for refilling and reshuffling. Personally I use a simplified operating scheme (a "wheel report") that doesn't track empty vs. full or individual cars. I don't see a problem with industries shipping to...

You can use the view block idea on a shelf layout too, it's just a different sort of view block. In fact, on a shelf layout it's actually easier to handle a view block, because on a shelf layout your view is limited. On a 4x8, a view block is necessary to visually separate halves of the layout...