I WAS A LITTLE surprised at the heft of this thing. Unlike the other operating accessories we’ve reviewed in this issue, this one packed a surprising 8 pounds, 7 ounces. Why? The diner itself isn’t a cheap plastic repop of the body of some old Marx car. No sir! It’s a genuine K-Line extruded aluminum […]
IN THE 1950s Lionel’s New Jersey factory cranked out tens of thousands of F3 diesels, and, in the decades since, Lionel has reissued its hallmark diesel dozens of times more. F3s were no more a stranger to MPC, LTI, and LLC-era catalogs than to Bob Sherman’s gloriously drawn postwar catalogs. But this new Lionel F3 […]
THE PENNSYLVANIA RAILROAD’S famous 4-4-4-4 Duplex drive T1 locomotive, designed by Raymond Loewy, epitomizes the rakish, spaceship look of industrial design in the late prewar years. If the locomotive’s outline looks familiar it should: its shape has been reproduced on thousands of calendars, artwork, and even non-railroad-related advertising. The Pennsy ordered two prototype Duplex-drive locomotives […]
IN MY MIND, the pinnacle of diesel locomotion is the General Motors SD40-2. Back when I would trudge through snowbanks in Wyoming and North Dakota to snap pictures of trains, it was the SD40-2 that got my heart pounding, rather than endless streams of GP-whatevers. The SD40-2 is big and burly. The long fore and […]
A COMMON, IF UNGLAMOROUS feature of prototype railroading is killing weeds, the eternal foe of good track and roadbed. I’ve seen this task handled by everything from crews walking alongside a hi-rail vehicle with spray tanks on their backs to railcars equipped with what looked like small flamethrowers. MTH’s Premier Line is first to offer […]
WOW! MTH has raised the bar yet again for the level of detail on a die-cast metal steam locomotive. The MTH Y3 locomotive commemorates a notable U.S. Railway Administration standardized design from the World War I years made famous by the Norfolk & Western. In the article “The USRA 2-8-8-2” in the January 1985 issue […]
SOMEWHERE IN THE ANNALS of toy train history, a tiny celebrity steam engine got lost in the crowd. When it was found, it somehow got lost again. In 1999, MTH began producing an O gauge die-cast model based on the Baltimore & Ohio’s C-16 “Docksider” steam switcher. The biggest surprise was that this is a […]
THANKS TO MTH, hobbyists around the country are coming up with clever ways to integrate subways and elevated transit lines into their layouts. The latest entry in the subway sweepstakes is a set of O gauge R-36 cars. The first of 424 of the eye-catching blue-and-white R-36 cars began arriving in New York City in […]
SURE, EMD’S POPULAR GP7 and GP9 diesels sealed the fate of steam power. But often overlooked is Alco’s contribution in the battle against steam, the RS-1 road switcher. Atlas O has built a scale-sized model of Alco’s first real road switcher, the RS-1. Noted New Haven railroad historian J.W. Swanberg once wrote that the RS-1 […]
SEVERAL YEARS BACK, Lionel’s then czar of engineering, Bob Grubba, tantalized Lionel Collector’s Club of America conventioneers in Minneapolis with the hint of a new track system. When hobbyists asked him if it would be a solid rail system like that of Atlas O, he smiled and said, “Think more along the line of Super […]
IN 1996, THE FIRST MTH RailKing articulated locomotive – the no. 30-1107 Union Pacific Challenger 4-6-6-4 – rolled onto tinplate track and created quite a stir. Regardless of its reduced dimensions, no manufacturer had ever offered an articulated, die-cast metal steamer for the small layout, tight-radius crowd. Its success heralded 1997’s Allegheny 2-6-6-6, 1998’s Big […]
CAN THERE EVER BE too many O gauge Santa Fe F units on the market? Probably not. General Motors cranked out these diesels by the thousands, and both the high and mighty lines, as well as scores of railroads you probably never heard of, used these trusty machines. As with New York Central Hudsons, the […]
