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Call me a cheapskate, or a relic, or whatever, but I have never paid and intend to never pay more that $5 for a freight car. Blue Box/MDC/Roundhouse are fine with me, with a few nicer Branchline cars thrown in when good deals were available. I've also never paid over $100 for a locomotive. In...

All I know is, if I were to win a Solyndra-sized lottery, you betcha I'm gettin' me an Alco! Jim (not that one)

The down side to all of these selling groups (and I belong to a number of them) is that there are many individuals who make multiple posts of their stuff to multiple groups, so we get buried with a legion of duplicate messages. And for what it's worth, while HOI has certainly not done itself any...

Well, David, HO scale is 1:87, so the closest you can get is the 1/8" on your architect's scale. HO scale is still about 10% larger than 1/8"=1', though, so if you wanted something that was, say 10' long in HO, you'd need to draw it about 11' long at 1/8" scale. If you have a calculator handy...

:eek: For what it's worth, that's double the maximum snow depth that we design roofs to support here in Indiana, where it was sunny and 50 degrees today... Stay warm and safe all.

Pardon me for being an L-girder killjoy, but I have to say that the innovators who brought us the modern miracle of L-girder benchwork to a large degree have sold the hobby a bill of goods. For starters, an L-grider made of two 1x4's has the same cross-sectional area of a single 2x4 and thus...

I made a couple of loads this week using the remnant gas tank & engine (with a few random parts added) from an ancient 1/25 model car kit, found rattling around in a scrap box. The tiedowns are black thread pulled taut & taped in place, with a few coats of diluted white glue brushed on...

Joe I appreciate that information (and in fact have already joined the historic society of the line I model), but I was actually speaking more from the modeling side. Where do the 'good' modelers go, that I might benefit from their wisdom? Jim

How, then, does one go about finding such groups? Not even to become a contributing member, but just to broaden one's knowledge base and learn new approaches, and even just admire the work of highly capable modelers.

And yet I see many of the same WPF posts at both MR and here. So if all of the 'accomplished' modelers have bailed on MR, where did they go?

Greenwood!?!?!? I live just a strong sneeze away from you, on Indy's far southeast side. Did you happen to get to Whistles and Growls before he closed his shop for good last week? (do your Gomer Pyle voice here) "Welcome, welcome, welcome!" Jim

That Atlas locomotive probably has the highest value of the collection. Not sure who made that particular model - if it says "Made in Japan" on the side of the box then it's one of the nice-running Kato drives. If it's made in Austria then it's from Rocco and won't be worth quite as much. I...

For what it's worth, 40 links per inch scales to about 2" inches per link in HO scale. 27 links per inch scales to about 3 1/4" per link.

I live in sagebrush-deprived Indiana. The best natural tree armatures I've found are the dead bloom stems from a Spirea bush in my front yard. Do a Google search to see what the bush looks like. If they grow here in the Hoosier state, I'd say it's a good bet you have some there in Michigan as...

:eek::eek::eek: I'm a structural engineer by trade, and I can't even begin to describe all the ways in which that canopy is a profoundly bad idea!

Not to mention the multiple floor joists that would need to be cut and resupported somehow to make a sufficently-sized opening (particularly in O scale!).

I second Jeff's suggestion. I generally have a couple of opened blister packs standing by for use as window glazing. It's even easier if you don't plan on modeling the interior - then you can just cut a single strip the full length of the caboose and glue it to the sides. Jim

I've always been amazed at the realistic texture of sagebrush trees. It makes the ideal tree armature. Sadly for me, there's not a lot of sagebrush floating around here in the Hoosier state. :( Jim

Cool locos & cabooses. Though, with a name like the T&A, I would've expected them to be bigger... Jim

I've snotted a number of my Spectrum and Genesis steamers, and it's improved their ability to pull longer trains up my 2.5% grades significantly. I highly recommend it. It's really pretty easy to apply, and if you mess it up, you can pretty easily remove it with a hobby knife and try again...