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I use Tamiya spray can paint. Once the track is down and soldered and tests out ok, I spray from very low each side heavily with "NATO Brown", then spray fine amounts of black from exactly on top (so it hits the ties and not the sides of the rail). Depending on where it's going to be...

With the greatest respect, Cannonball, I don't agree. All magnetic couplers are not equal. The only ones I've found to work reliably are the body-mount Micro-Trains ones, part 1041. They can be made to fit on almost everything except for really weird locos and very long (70+ foot) cars, where...

Yes, sort of... Whatever you do (if you don't buy a loco with DCC installed), get a loco that you *know* has a drop-in decoder available (normally referred to as 'plug and play'). Don't fall for a loco that calls itself "DCC-Ready" -- this is a con, and means that there isn't a plug and play...

Don't give up yet -- almost no structure is beyond hope whatever happens to it. You just need to adjust the 'story' that lies behind the building... I always build the structure (or at least the vast majority of it) before painting. This allows you to fill and sand all the edges...

Does that mean we get a new thread? :-)))

It looks very like an Alco RS-2. Although it isn't the Kato 'current' release, as it's not got the one-piece light board. Atlas did an RS-2 ages ago but the handrails were awful -- is it a more recent one of those? Or is it an old Kato one? The underside should tell you... sorry I can't be...

And just to add fun to the mix -- if you control your Tortoises with Switch-its, they have a momentary input to the circuit board, so as well as controlling them remotely or by computer or routes, you can use momentary toggles to switch them, as many as you like in parallel, along with LED...

Whilst that tortoise mount looks extremely elegant -- I wonder how you replace them? I've had two tortoises die after installation, and those look like a bear to get out...

Check out the Switch-it at Tony's too. They're not only a lot cheaper, they run two tortoises each (so they're half the price again). Tony's used to do a switch-it with two tortoises as a special deal, but it looks like they've been nobbled by the Hare manufacturers... or they make more...

Try this link for real bridge/canal engineering... The boat arrives at the bottom, and the entire end section spins round lifting the boat 115 feet into the air to join the other canal that comes flying off the side of a hill. Freaky. The whole thing is so well-engineered that it only...

Do you want to control the turnouts from DCC? If so, I'd seriously suggest looking at Tortoises and something like the NCE Switch-it controllers. No worries about holding stuff down for too long. You don't need a control panel with switches, but if and when you want one, you can do it with...

Gosh, your town is very well-behaved... everyone crowding round the church rather than the soda shop. I bet you don't get much graffiti around there.... :-) Great shot...

Just about everything will run, with the exception of enormous steam big boys possibly. What you'll have to be careful of is extra-long passenger and freight (autoracks, TOFCs etc). They'll need longer truck-mounted couplers to make sure everything stays connected, and most importantly you...

Get into the Track Planning for the Future area of this forum. There's loads of lunatics on there who'll be glad to help... no questions are too dumb...

Good stuff... I like the steps and walkway... Try looking for blueprints, like on this site: CERC Blueprints index You can buy them full-sized (for real buildings), but they're easily good enough in 'preview' as A4 pages for model making. Some nice sheds and farm buildings, with dates so...

If you're not rich, choose N. Z is heaps of cash, particularly for nice diesels... And you get more space covered with each piece of N stuff (as it's bigger), quite apart from it being cheaper because there's a bigger market.

Try reading this thread about coupler conversions that was on this board a few weeks ago... there's a fair bit there...

You can't 'shield' a magnetic field, at least not this side of Flash Gordon magazines. Most other metals would corrode too much to be of use (or be too soft, in the case of brass). But I wonder whether it'd be worth trying one of those conductive pens on plastic wheelsets? I suspect it might...

Technically that would be feasible, but it'd probably be a whole lot easier to invent DCC from scratch :-)... but how come you need more than two locos for a 20-car train anyway? two should pull 20 cars fine up 2-3% surely?

No-one ever got sacked for buying IBM... :-)