My dad and I are finally taking our HO scale trains out of the boxes they have lived in for two years and are building a new layout.

I was just wondering who else loves model trains.

 

I did as a kid.  I had quite a large LGB setup.  All the trains are in boxes in the basement right now and have been for years.  The train table in the garage is now used as a storage unit.

 

I will get back into it at some point, just not in the near future.

 

I did as a kid. Built my own buildings and had a large layout. I may set a new one up in my loft soon.

Definitely not. They were boring. I had a a remote controlled car. I could run it into stuff.

Post-war Lionel.  I have my original 1953 set.  Milwaukee Rd GP-9

Definitely not. They were boring. I had a a remote controlled car. I could run it into stuff.

Haha yeah trains are too expensive for that. 

My dad also has some American Flyer from the 50's.  I have never seen them though haha.

I had a Marklin HO setup when I was a kid, which was excruciating, because every piece of track and every car or engine was ridiculously expensive.  It was an early lesson in the cost of free health care and the overhyping of German-made products.  Also, none of the American magazines covered Marklin whatsoever and there obviously was no internet so there was no way to know what was going on.  Hell, only parts of the Marklin catalog were in English!   

 

Also, European freight equipment is incredibly wimpy compared to American equipment, and Marklin's line-up was messed up because some of the cars were die cast and others were lightweight plastic, meaning the heavy cars always had to ride behind the engines.  They barely made any American equipment and I didn't have any since they marked it up. 

 

Also, the way Marklin reverses with the center pickup shoe and jerking motion is RIDICULOUS.  They would go on and on in the catalog about how it improved reliability or whatever, but that was a bunch of nonsense.  I had tons of trouble with remote parts of the layout and had to constantly scrape rust off the rails with this thing thing that looked like an eraser. 

I had one a long time ago.  Last time I saw it was 1998 when we thought we were moving out to Oakland, CA.  It was actually very advanced.  I had about 60-75 buildings, some of them quite large.  Now it's in storage.  I checked on it a couple years ago and it looked like a lot of it got damaged from moisture.  The superglue turned the plastic a weird color. 

 

I have neither the money nor the time for model railroading, but if I did, it would be this stuff: 1.5 inches to the foot, coal-fired live steam. The power of engines this size is amazing.

 

 

It's like garden railroading on a grand scale. I think this part of the Hesston operation covers about twenty acres of an old gravel pit that's partly grown up in trees.

That thing is a beast!!! I want that and I don't even like model trains!

I want to implement the above novelty as my city's new transit system!

^Think of the money it would save.

Same number of passengers as Cincinnati's proposed trolley!!

 

That's why you guys need to buy naming rights for the Pampers Express. They could have free fares and increase ridership.

You are just trying to get me to go off topic so I will get in trouble again!!

Rob, is that 1/8th scale?  I saw a video on youtube of some place that has a HUGE 1/8 scale Union Pacific line.  It's awesome.

When my dad and I start doing our layout I'm going to model a little city also.  I'll be sure to take photos of it.  I'm going to model your typical small rust-belt Ohio or Pennsylvania town.  It'll be interesting.

Yes, 1/8 scale describes it. It's 7- or 7 1/2-inch gauge, and standard gauge is 56 1/2 inches (4 feet, 8 1/2 inches).

 

Hesston also features an extensive 1/4 scale layout as well as 2-foot and 3-foot track, with Czech-built and German locomotives and a Shay. The 1/4-scale setup was mostly a bequest from the RR Donnelly (publishing magnate) estate and includes several locomotives in various styles, all very accurately detailed.

 

Some of those 1/8 scale locomotives are surprisingly powerful. Very soon after they leave the station area, they encounter a steep grade. With six or eight generously-proportioned adults on the train, they can accelerate up that hill fast enough that you'd end up running to keep up.

 

You can see more of the goodies at Hesston here.

It's not as big or as elaborate as Strasburg, but they have an interesting variety of toys. It's straight north of La Porte, Indiana, and the track comes within spitting distance (literally) of the Michigan state line.

I had an LGB and HO scale set up as a kid. I still have the LGB and I'm sure it will see life when I have kids.

BTW if anyone of you knows AutoCAD, Adobe illustrator, or any program out there that allows you to draw lines (vector format) you could draw your buildings and take them to your local plastic dealer to have them laser cut and then assembled.  When I was in architecture school we used to make miniature models of cities for our site models out of basswood and would even cut in window mullions and terra cotta details.  They can get pretty powerful

If I started doing that, I wouldn't be able to stop haha.  I would become addicted.

BTW if anyone of you knows AutoCAD, Adobe illustrator, or any program out there that allows you to draw lines (vector format) you could draw your buildings and take them to your local plastic dealer to have them laser cut and then assembled. When I was in architecture school we used to make miniature models of cities for our site models out of basswood and would even cut in window mullions and terra cotta details. They can get pretty powerful

 

I haven't followed the model railroading magazines, but I know that some of them include dimensioned drawings for buildings for model railroad layout construction. It doesn't seem like too much of a stretch to create something like those in autocad and sell them on CD or download. Would it be possible to create them so that they could easily be scaled for different-sized layouts, from N or HO clear up to LGB size for garden railroads?

 

I know some model railroaders who spend hours with an X-acto knife painstakingly cutting and shaping and gluing and painting. A local Presbyterian minister used to model in HO and laid his own track, spiking rails to ties. He built a tavern near his rail yard that had a bar and stools and tables inside, and you could lift off the roof to see all the details. Guys like him probably wouldn't want to buy anything ready-made.

^Holy crap.  That minister's layout must look amazing.  Atlas, one of the major HO companies, offers "flex-track" which is basically what he did.  You buy the rails, ties and tiny bolts and lay your own track.  I am thinking of buying some for the yard we are building and for a street running scene I have planned.

I don't know what became of his layout. He's been in a nursing home with Alzheimer's for several years, now. I run into his daughter occasionally, but it has never occurred to me at the moment to ask about his railroad. The last time I talked with her, she said that he still knows his family members, but she wasn't sure how much longer that would last.

 

Alzheimer's is such a tragedy. He was a brilliant, articulate man who managed to make the transition from a conservative small-town congregation to a larger city church where his sensibilities evolved. He became an outspoken advocate for gays, immigrants, and labor. He was calm and able to talk reasonably with the people with whom he disagreed, and whether or not he ever changed anyone's mind, most were willing to hear him out.

Yesterday was my first day working at a hobby shop. I'm an R/C car guy, but I'm going to be learning at least some about trains as I go. People that are really into trains don't come into HobbyTown much anyway, so I won't get called on the carpet too much.

I honor him for his hard work, but I think I and any others would resort to laser cutting everything.  It's fast, precise, and more intricate.  You can scale the drawings to any size you want, yes.    I don't have any idea what scale we used in architecture school to model cities, probably something around HO scale for larger projects, but you could put in quite the level of detail.

 

 

I had a small one when I was a kid.  It was a sort of oval with sidings and a cross track.

 

It was totally German.  The trains, the houses and stores, the stations, the churches, the scenery.  The equiment was a German company called Flieschmann.  The houses and landscaping was either Kibri or Faller.  Almost all of it was imported from Germany though some things came from a hobby shop in Chicago that carreid German stuff.

 

I think its all boxed up somewhere. 

 

 

Hey everyone, I thought I would revive this topic. I had a train layout when I was a kid, and I recently started up a small one to put up for Christmas. Wanted to do a modern city one, not your typical old timey layout. Came across a Japanese company, KATO which makes modern streetcars and commuter lines. Its pretty cool, but I am just getting started. It's n scale, so doesn't take up too much space...yet.

 

If anyone knows anything about the KATO Unitram system, or has seen it in a store somehwere let me know. The N American version of the embedded street tracks are hard to find and mostly sold out online.

 

There are somehow three model train (or train heavy) stores around Columbus. I'll be sure to keep an eye out for the KATO system, but (it's been a while) they tend to be mostly American stuff.

 

I was all about model trains when I was a kid. Never had a "real" layout (though my uncle had a massive, hyper-realistic Appalachian HO coal mining operation in his basement), but certainly a few small attempts. Still have some of my (American) N stuff, 1980's Märklin HO and 1990's Z stuff, and a recent LGB set. Probably some of my old American HO stuff is somewhere in my parent's house.

 

Now and then I get the itch to get back into model trains, but we don't exactly have the space for a real layout, and doing what I have in my head would cost a fortune. I know I'd probably end up wanting to make it super realistic too, but that also can take some of the fun out of it (especially for a kindergartener helping).

 

The temptation is there for an G-scale setup in the yard, since that doesn't have to be realistic - but major $, and the "what if we move" problem. So at this point, we've gone all-in on Lego trains. We set them up on the floor now and then, reconfigure or rebuild when we get bored, and we can build (and rebuild) all of our accessories. Nothing has to have a real-world analog to look right or make sense, part of the fun is being able to improvise solutions to "problems" that don't exist in reality (how do we make a train car to transport this LEGO t-rex skeleton which is low enough to fit under our bridges?). Plus, if the kid drops a train, it's easy enough to fix. 

 

If we ever move and have a basement better set-up for trains (ours is divided up by foundation walls), I could see doing a bit more permanent LEGO layout. That said, the kid got Märklin MyWorld trains for Christmas last year, which are semi-realistic, battery powered (with remotes), but simple and durable. They run on a plastic version of Märklin HO C-Track. He's really taken to them lately, so maybe they end up being a gateway to real model railroading.

17 minutes ago, mrCharlie said:

There are somehow three model train (or train heavy) stores around Columbus. I'll be sure to keep an eye out for the KATO system, but (it's been a while) they tend to be mostly American stuff.

 

 

Thanks for looking for me. Kato has a North American HQ supposedly in suburban Chicago, but nobody around here has much either. The North American version has the streets striped for the opposite of Japanese drivers. They mainly have two lines Unitrak and Unitram. I am looking for the Unitram tracks with the street sections. You never know in some of these old dusty hobby shops what they might have.