Your Model and Railroad blog by the folk at SMARTT
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HOW LED’S ARE CHANGING THE FACE OF MODEL RAILROADINGJanuary 19, 2012 More than a century ago, fast talking hucksters would often roll into town touting the latest, greatest snake oil, fit to cure what ails ya’. In the twenty-first century, it’s no snake-oil sales pitch to say that Light Emitting Diodes (LED’s) are the c… |
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ADDING A STORY TO YOUR MODEL RAILROADJanuary 13, 2012 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… |
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DID YOU KNOW . . . RAILROADS ARE HELPING EXPLORE OUTER SPACE?January 5, 2012 Well, we’re not laying track into the final frontier just yet, but the Very Large Array (VLA), a network of mobile radio telescope dish antennas that is part of the National Radio Astronomy Observatory are repositioned via a system of double railroad t… |
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MODELING POSTWAR LUXURY PASSENGER TRAINS IN HO SCALEJanuary 2, 2012 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 v… |
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MINIATUR WUNDERLAND – WHAT’S IN A NAME?December 14, 2011 Wow. If you haven’t seen it yet, let me just put the words straight into your mouth. Wow. What am I talking about? The new 2012 official promo video for Hamburg, Germany’s Miniatur Wunderland, the world’s biggest and most detailed public model train di… |
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MODELING SUGAR, PT.2 – A MODEL RAILROAD SUGAR MILLDecember 8, 2011 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 operat… |
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MODELING SUGAR PRODUCTION ON YOUR MODEL RAILROAD, PT1: THE RAILROADS AND THE MILLSDecember 1, 2011 Drive up US 27 out of Fort Lauderdale, and you will see what looks like something right out of Dante’s Inferno, fires that appear to originate from the bowels of the earth! This, in fact, is an indication that you are near one of the most unique railro… |
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COMING FULL CIRCLE WITH A TOY TRAIN LAYOUTNovember 28, 2011 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 b… |
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TUTORIAL – DETAILING THE LIONEL COAL ELEVATOR: MORE THAN JUST PAINTNovember 14, 2011 The Lionel Coal elevator has been around for decades. It is truly one of the classic tin plate accessories of the 1950’s. So, how do you take a tin plate accessory and turn it into something more realistic? Here is how we upgraded a pair of them at SMA… |
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LET’S MODEL THOSE FLORIDA TRAINSNovember 10, 2011 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 Di… |