WAY BACK IN 1965, I showed Joe, my next door neighbor, my prize birthday present: a James Bond Shooting Attaché Case (made by MPC, no less). Joe, a grownup insurance salesman, opened it up, smiled, and said, “Boy, Bobby, you could commit mayhem with this!” Opening the box for the Operation Iraqi Freedom train set, […]
ONE OF THE MOST distinctive experimental locomotives of the 1930s was the Pennsylvania Railroad’s S1-class Duplex-drive 6-4-4-6 locomotive. Originally developed as a replacement for the railroad’s venerable K4s 4-6-2 Pacific locomotives, the big S1, of which only one was built, was designed to be a high-speed passenger engine, capable of hauling a 1,200-ton train at […]
PLANES, TRAINS, AND automobiles. Back in the 1950s, the birth of the Interstate Highway system launched the era of long-distance motoring while at the same time air travel became more affordable and more common for ordinary people. Planes and automobiles were on the upswing, but passenger trains were not. Most railroads still weren’t ready to […]
FEW OF THE locomotives that I’ve reviewed strike me as elegant. After all, in the real world these were just machines made to pull heavy loads. All the same, I would even forsake my beloved New York Central to say that the Southern Railway Ps-4-class 4-6-2 Pacific in that railroad’s wonderful green, gold, and white […]
A SMALL BUT NOTABLE trend in our hobby is the steady re-emergence of British three-rail O gauge toy trains, led by Ace Trains in London. In recent years we’ve reviewed Ace’s 4-4-4T steamers, electric multiple-unit commuter trains, passenger car sets, and, most recently, its new line of O gauge tank wagons. Each is beautifully crafted […]
OKAY, KOKOMO isn’t exactly on the right-of-way of the Chicago South Shore & South Bend Railroad, but I’ve got your attention, right? Well, I hope so, because Weaver has produced a first-rate model of a remarkable locomotive that soldiered on in relative obscurity, deserving of a better fate. The General Electric 2-D+D-2 was one of […]
COLORFULLY DECORATED TRAINS, cold Molson ale, and Shania Twain are by far my favorite Canadian exports. I know some people won’t share my enthusiasm for all three, but I’m willing to venture that at least one piques your interest. Based on the contents of their Canadian Pacific Grain Train boxed set, I’d think that the […]
GROWING UP ON the east coast of Florida, I found Rocky Mountain electrification to be a pretty arcane subject. Whether the locomotives were those large, boxy things that evoked the pages of Tom Swift and his Electric Locomotive, or streamlined, dual-cab models that suggested they were some sort of super funky F units, these unusual […]
NO DOUBT, EVER since grade school, we’ve all looked at slot-car tracks and our three-rail trains and wondered how to put the two together. We at CTT have been enraptured with the prospect of O gauge street running ever since we saw the two-rail cobblestone street system by Czech manufacturer ETS/SemafÖr (CTT, January, 2005). As […]
AS THEY SAY, nothing succeeds like success, and the EMD F40 is nothing if not a winner. In the early days of Amtrak in the 1970s, it became clear that the railroad’s aging fleet of mismatched locomotives inherited from various passenger railways needed both standardization and modernization. First out of the gate to power Amtrak’s […]
Marc Horovitz 1:32 scale, Gauge 1, live-steam 2-8-2 kit Aster of Japan (For further information and US dealer list contact: Hyde-Out Mountain Live Steam) 89060 New Rumley Road Jewett OH 43986 Prices: kit, $3,995; built up, $4,675 All metal, prepainted, screwdriver-assembly kit for a USRA light Mikado; internally-fired boiler; working Walschaerts valve gear; alcohol burning. […]
This structure on the Greenbriar Cheat & Elk railway was made out of blue foam insulation board. Randy Mower I have been scratch building structures for my Greenbriar Cheat & Elk garden railroad since 1993. Although I have commercial structures on my railway, I wanted to have buildings that were unique to my railroad, so […]
