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When I inherited my father's half-finished N scale layout back in 2011, I remember staring at the boxes of locomotives and rolling stock, each one stamped with that intimidating "14+" warning. My nephew was seven at the time and utterly fascinated. I found myself wondering: was I supposed to lock th …

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 …

Five years ago, when Mike Wolf announced he was retiring and closing MTH Electric Trains, I genuinely thought the O gauge world was about to lose one of its most innovative players. I remember sitting in my office at the Railroad Museum, staring at my shelf of MTH Premier PRR locomotives, wondering …

I'll be honest with you: when I first started helping fellow modelers troubleshoot their layouts, I thought dirty track was dirty track. Grab some alcohol on a rag, run it around the rails, call it a day. After years of watching perfectly good locomotives stutter across what looked like clean track, …

I've been running O gauge trains since my dad first set up that Lionel loop around the Christmas tree in our Cicero living room back in 1972. After 28 years of fixing things at the CTA's Skokie Shops, I've learned that the difference between something that works and something that looks right often …

I spent 35 years working the real iron for Burlington Northern Santa Fe before retiring, and I can tell you that the vintage O gauge trains value question gets asked at every train meet I attend. Guys walk up to tables with shoeboxes full of their dad's old Lionels, hoping they're sitting on a goldm …