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After forty years of building houses, I thought I understood construction. Then I bought my first HO locomotive with a 21-pin socket and realized the model railroad industry has its own building code. The good news? Once you crack the code, HO scale DCC ready locomotives offer the best path to digit …

When my husband passed in 2008, he left me a basement full of trains and a half-finished layout that made absolutely no sense to me. I spent the first six months just staring at it, wondering why the beautiful 85-foot passenger cars he'd collected kept derailing on certain curves while his little 40 …

I've been modeling the Pennsylvania Railroad since 1989, and my HO layout has been "almost finished" since 2014. If that timeline tells you anything, it's that I've had plenty of time to make mistakes and learn from them. Most of those mistakes happened during track planning, not scenery. A crooked …

I got back into model railroading because I thought it would be relaxing. After twenty years managing freight logistics, I figured pushing tiny trains around a basement would be the perfect antidote to pushing real ones across spreadsheets. Then I discovered prototype operations, and now my Saturday …

I spend most of my modeling time in N scale, which means I watch the HO world with a mix of envy and bewilderment. You folks get everything. Every road number. Every phase variation. Sound decoders that could pass for recordings from the cab. And yet, with all those choices, the question I hear most …

I've built four HO layouts since retiring from the construction business, and every single one taught me the same painful lesson: the curve radius printed on your locomotive box is about as reliable as a contractor's estimate on a bathroom remodel. That 18-inch minimum they claim? It's technically t …