Blog

My first layout was a disaster. I know that now. At the time, I thought I was building my dream railroad in my basement. What I actually built was a 12x14-foot monument to every rookie error in the hobby. The track buckled in summer. Half my turnouts sat in unreachable corners. My wiring was so unde …

When my husband Bill passed in 2008, he left me with a half-finished HO layout and a freight depot kit sitting on the workbench with exactly twelve pieces glued together. I hadn't touched a model train in my life. Thirty-four years of teaching high school art in Worcester had prepared me to critique …

When I inherited my father's unfinished N scale layout back in 2011, I spent three frustrated weeks trying to figure out why his locomotives wouldn't run on some of the track he'd left behind. Turns out, I'd accidentally mixed some Z scale track into an N scale layout while cleaning up his workbench …

Look, I spent six months agonizing over whether to build in N scale or HO before I finally committed to my Detroit intermodal layout. I measured my basement seventeen times. I read every forum thread. I made spreadsheets. And you know what? Most of that hand-wringing was unnecessary because I was as …

I've watched guys pour thousands into garden railroads only to rip them out three years later. Bad drainage. Wrong track material. Frost heave that turned their mainline into a roller coaster. After spending 28 years fixing things at the CTA Skokie Shops, I can spot a doomed project from across the …

I've spent three decades modeling Great Northern and Northern Pacific in HO scale, so when my buddy Hans from the Lake Superior Railroad Museum started raving about TT scale trains, I figured he'd lost his marbles. Why would anyone abandon the massive selection of HO for some oddball scale I barely …