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I spent 40 years building houses in the St. Croix Valley before I picked up model railroading in 2018. My wife told me I needed a hobby that didn't leave sawdust in the kitchen, and trains seemed like a natural fit. Four layouts later, I've learned that building a reliable model railroad isn't all t …

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 …

I run N scale. My layout fits in a spare bedroom, and I spend most of my time designing custom detail parts on my 3D printer. But last summer, a friend asked me to help troubleshoot her outdoor G scale railway, and I fell down a rabbit hole that lasted months. What I discovered surprised me: the G s …

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, …