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Weathering tends to show texture... that's one of the reasons it gives a cool effect. Unfortunately it makes glue show up... as my high school shop teacher said, glue doesn't take a finish. The dullcoat might work, as might very fine sandpaper. Be careful with solvents, too much and it could...

That's funny, I found a small digital clock in a McDonald's toy way back and I've been looking for a good use for it. It's very small and IMO it would fit nicely somewhere. Hook in a AA instead of a little coin cell and it'll run until the heat death of the universe. But yeah, with the proper...

Nice work!

Sites that run talking ads should be automatically deleted... I had my earbuds in and that surprised the hell out of me.

Modern power packs have an internal circuit board that pulse width modulates the power... you could hook the computer output to the gate pin of the power transistor and have full speed control instead of just on/off. Add a double-throw relay to that and you could control direction too. This...

The beta for Photobucket was awful but the new version actually isn't that bad. I don't like that you have to load the image editor just to resize but at least it doesn't take forever to load anymore. Never tried Flickr but my dad uses it without much trouble.

Check the pickups on the Hiawatha, sounds like maybe the connections from the tender aren't getting to the engine? Bad solder joint somewhere? Also diesels will take a lot worse track than steamers, especially long steamers. If you've got tight corner or sharp transitions between grades, it...

Bonus crab meat!

Before I made mine I browsed through the 'suitcase' sized railroads (there was a website but I didn't save the URL) for the simplest switching ops I could find. I only had one switch at my disposal, but managed three output tracks by building a working transfer table. The best part was that I...

Blades, even sharp ones, tend to make the foam bunch up and tear rather than cutting. The challenge would be making a wire thin enough to heat up (without becoming a space heater) but big enough to hold its shape.

A little 'warty,' sure, but still very cool!

Sounds like a good plan! A couple things to look out for though. One, if you use Sharpie on foam and then paint over with acrylics, that Sharpie will bleed through. Two, for the water cutout, make sure the base is dead flat. I cut mine out with a fork... terrible idea.

Reminds me of the Bachmann 4-4-0s I used to mess around with... when they were new they could barely pull a few cars up a grade, but pretty quickly they got so they couldn't haul themselves. Miserable little things! But my cheap Life-Like split-frame GP-3something would just about pull stumps...

I carve with a hot wire, a steak knife, one of those little micro-plane things for shredding cheese, really whatever's at hand. In fact I've made small depressions in terrain by heating the foam with a cigarette lighter. The nice thing about the lighter/hot wire/hot knife stuff is that it...

Well, I thought I liked the water okay, but then the water effects stuff dried properly and showed off the huge bubbles under the surface. So I painted over the surface and tried another coat. There must be some way of laying down Realistic Water without introducing bubbles, but I'm not sure...

Looks like the pics are hosted on nscale.net, and they probably don't load for anyone who's not registered there. The IMG codes work though! Looks great! :)

Some kind of reverse loop? If I'm remembering correctly, there are commercially available electronics that'll sense the short and change polarity in a section, DC or DCC.

Sounds like a good way to do it! Your pics don't work, though. (Or is it just me?)

I like foam. You can do a lot with it and you can use just about any tool you have lying around. Those hot-wire foam things are great (smelly though) and they don't make dust like a saw does. I've got a very small (like 1' by 4' small) layout, so my benchwork consists entirely of a piece of...

Sounds like fun. :) My advice is to start small but leave room for expansion. I'm wrapping up a 1' by 4' N scale layout that I may add onto at some point. Especially when you're new, it's good to play around a bit first and get most of your screw-ups out of the way on something small.