Modeling from postcards

Image of downtown scene with buildings and vehicles

In last month’s installment, we took a look at two postcards that showed aerial views of Crookston, Minn., my hometown. This time we’ll examine two ground-level scenes, one in the city and the other in the country. The heart of downtown. The intersection of Broadway (the north-south street the photographer is standing in) and Robert […]

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Modeling from postcards

Black-and-white aerial view of Crookston, Minn., looking east in the late 1920s.

Welcome to the first of a three-part series where I’ll show you the various modeling information you can learn from postcards. The cards in this series are all from Crookston, Minn., my hometown and the focus of my modeling research. Similar postcards can be found for most communities. Online auction websites like eBay are a […]

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Nighttime Operations on Dave Abeles’ Conrail Onondaga Cutoff

Railroading is an industry that operates around the clock, and modeler Dave Abeles proves that model railroads can roll just fine in the dark too! Watch the night moves from a trackside position on Dave’s Conrail-inspired HO scale layout, and then look for additional coverage of the model railroad in the September 2019 and February […]

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Cody’s Trackside Finds

Four red CN high-cube distributed braking cars in the middle of an intermodal train.

Welcome to Cody’s Trackside Finds, a new series on Trains.com, where we’ll look at interesting locomotives, freight cars, structures, or details that I’ve come across while railfanning. In these entries, I’ll provide some background information on the subject, give you some modeling tips, and most importantly, encourage comments from the Trains.com community. Do you have […]

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A fun way to operate your garden railroad

A hand holding two, handmade, four-sided dice.

We enjoy operations on our Weona (we-own-a) Railroad, but we wanted something different for our operating sessions. Here’s how we do it. I made a pair of four-sided dice, one with sides labeled 1, 2, 3, and 4, and the other 1, 2, 3, and blank, giving a possible outcome of 1 to 7, to […]

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Adjusting coupler height on passenger cars

The height of a knuckle coupler on an HO scale passenger car is checked with a Kadee gauge.

It’s important to mount couplers at the correct height and to do so consistently on all cars. Because of their length, passenger cars magnify the chance for unwanted uncouplings when track isn’t perfectly level. Of course, having made the car height accurate, I don’t want to change that, so to adjust coupler height I move […]

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