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My dad ran Lionel trains around our Christmas tree in Cicero, Illinois, back when I was knee-high to a boxcar. I never once heard him use the word "scale." It was always "O gauge this" and "O gauge that." Took me years to figure out he was technically wrong. And here's the thing: he wasn't alone. Mo …

I spent four decades building houses in the St. Croix Valley, and if there's one thing that career taught me, it's this: measure twice, cut once, and never skip the foundation work. When I started my first HOn3 layout three years ago, I brought that same philosophy to the workbench. Good thing, too. …

When I first started helping out at my local model railroad club, someone asked me whether my dad's old British locomotives would run on their HO layout. "Same track gauge," they said with a shrug. "Should work fine." It took me about thirty seconds of watching a Hornby Dublo steam engine waddle do …

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 …