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I spent 35 years working for Burlington Northern Santa Fe before I retired in 2019, and I've been building model railroads almost as long as I worked on the real ones. After watching countless friends and acquaintances try to get into this hobby only to give up in frustration, I wanted to put togeth …

I bought my first Broadway Limited locomotive in 1989, set it on a borrowed loop of track, and immediately realized I had no idea what I was doing. The locomotive ran beautifully. The track? A disaster of wobbly joints and dead spots. Thirty-five years later, I've learned a few things about what sep …

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 …

I still remember the moment my HO layout went from "collection of trains" to "believable miniature world." It wasn't a new locomotive or a fancy structure kit. It was a $22 pack of Preiser figures placed on my depot platform. Suddenly, my layout had people. It had stories. That single purchase chang …