John Henry was about three days old, sittin' on his papa's knee. He picked up a hammer and a little piece of steel; said, "Hammer's gonna be the death of me, Lord, Lord. Hammer's gonna be the death of me."

How many of us remember how much fun it was to run our American Flyer and Lionel passenger trains with the lights turned off.  All the locomotives and most of the passenger cars were illuminated, with the passenger cars having silhouetted figures in the windows. We also illuminated our structures (mostly Bachmann’s Plasticville line of O/S...

My Skid Row Mission incorporates all three previous mentioned themes of such a facility, filling food, lodging, and spiritual needs.  I started with the Bar Mills kit, The Gravely Building. I first made some structural changes by adding extensions to the building as if they were added on after the building was first completed. The add-on...

“Pan Am 52, you’re clear on runway two-zero-niner, excuse me, track 1; excuse me again NYC M-497 you are clear on track 1.”

The first part of the above quote is from our January 2012 newsletter. It was in reference to the Pan Am Railroad’s (formerly Gilford Transportation) repainting one of their former Main Central GP-9...

Here is a fun way you can enhance your model railroad and use your creative writing skills at the same time. Create stories around your model railroad by writing about it and then printing them out as handouts for your guests.  This can be very useful when you decide to invite your friends over for an operating session or open house....

The last decade of the twentieth century saw a revolution in the detail and quality of HO plastic diesel locomotives. Prior to 1989 if you wanted a model of a plastic diesel locomotive you were limited to a few not very detailed models encompassing a very short list of road names. Things began to change in 1989 when Life-Like Models introduced...

Modeling the Florida sugar operations would be challenging and take a high skill level in model building. Commercially there are no off the shelf kits that follow any of the structures, locomotives, and rolling stock that match the Florida sugar operation. However, there are plenty of items available that can be made into close reproductions of...

Do you remember how you and your dad had a Lionel train set back in the late 1950’s? How every Holiday season the both of you would set it up in the garage on a sheet of 4X8 plywood?  There was a long sleek silver passenger train pulled by 3 of those big red and silver Santa Fe diesel locomotives.  That train ran around on an oval...

Let’s see how, or if we can model those beautiful Florida passenger trains. For those who love to model passenger trains the time has never been better for ready-to-run models. Let’s start at the natural beginning --- the locomotives, both Steam and Diesel.

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