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Another dose of tips

“Thank you for the constant info and images – all very inspiring.

Here’s an easy upgrade I have done on a lima 9400 – Add additional wheel pickups

The problem with these is the rail pickup is only on the front two wheels hence stalling on points and crossovers.

By unsoldering the wires from the pickups to the motor and replacing them with thin solid brass rod, additional thin flexible copper or brass strips can be soldered to pickup on the rear wheels.

A huge improvement is seen. You can also paint the visible part of the pickups black to blend in.

Sam”

“Al,

I know most of the folks on this chat group are HO people. I like O and especially S gauge.

My question is, how do you build an S and O gauge layout with limited space. Answer is to use the same track.

I built an “OS” gauge track and can run both S and O gauge on the same track with the same transformer.

It allows me to park cars for simulated loading and unloading next to buildings and .hoppers with out the space between tracks.

Also built my own cross overs and dedicated Ys I can use an S engine to pull O cars and visa versa with a modified adapter. Laugh but I enjoy running both gauges on the same track.

Joseph”

“Is there anyone out there who knows the trick/tip how to glue those ultra-microscopic plastic people, that are supposedly in HO scale (via Woodland Scenics) that will make them stay permanently on a foam sheet (or any flat surface)?

The feet on the people are so small, I have no idea how to keep them standing up (such as construction workers on a street or train station people waiting on the platform.)

How Woodland (and other companies) can call these HO scale (clearly marked on the package and bought from E-bay or Amazon) is beyond me.

WK”

I do love the way you folk come up with these ideas and solutions – please do keep ’em coming!

That’s all this time peeps.

And if today is the day you start laying track again, the Beginner’s Guide is here.

Best

PS Latest ebay cheat sheet is here.

Michael’s layout

“Interesting stuff. In case it might appeal….I’m an Englishman living in New York…building my second ‘N’ scale layout with the help of my stepdaughter who is now 32 yrs… the first one we made was in California when she was 11 yrs.

The whole point of this one is to use as little as possible things from the model shop (which are lousy in NYC anyway) and also to make it as individual and asymetric as possible…. it’s going to be a sculpture/diarama of New Mexico that happens to have trains.

My rolling stock is nearly all pre-owned (second-hand things) that we bought as ‘broken’ and rebulit/painted whatever…the baseboard is an open 3’x3’x3′ cube that the scultor downstairs in my factory/loft used to put sculptures on, covered with teo sheets of plywood from the dumpster….the furniture factory on my ground floor supplies foam that I grind up for foliage etc and we collect coffee/tea for ground cover/ballast etc.

We break ALL the rules..train liveries are all my designs, passenger cars all lit with their own LED/batteries inside…I have a flair for rebuilding locomotives, old pre-war American ones are particularly tricky in steam (the first trick is to put current pick-ups in the stupid 8 wheel,2 truck tenders so that the short wheelbase 6 driving wheels don’t stall on the turnouts (points) …the list goes on…just thought it might be of interest..specially ” What Not To Do’ written in a funny, entertaining way.

My loft overlooks the Harlem River by the Park Ave lift bridge which carries ALL the trains out of Grand Central (sadly now only boring details) and there is a freight line IN THE RIVER on piles which takes the CSX garbage trains from New York to Virginia twice a a day so I am not lost for references.

Here’s a few pix of how we have progressed since December

Michael”

And Dangerous Dave is back in the loop after his knee op:

“Morning Al, here is the follow on video from the new cement wagons , I bought a new loco to go with them its a class 66 with beautiful sound and livery.

Regards

Dave”