Peter's Model Railroading | My Library | Model Railroader 2004-07
Articles Listing

S Scale Great Northern Pacific

Photos by Bob Werre. Beautiful photos of big vistas accompany this article about the author's 33-year old layout that fits in a 20'x44' space. The layout is set in the mid 1950s and models a freelance of various western railroads in northern Idaho. The article describes the process of building a house into which the layout was planned, how the author uses natural materials for scenery, and how his hobby within the hobby is scratchbuilding steam locomotives (50 of them!).

Build An Animated Coaling Station

A detailed article on how the author built a coaling tower modeled after the steel tower that the Colorado & Southern built in 1946 at its Rice Yard engine terminal in Denver, Colorado. It has animated coaling chutes to simulate the flow of coal into the steam engines' tender over two tracks. Includes many close-up photos of construction details and a scaled drawing. The animation is done using Hankscraft slow-motion switch machines.

Mail on the Rails

This article is an history on the use of trains to transport mail over the decades.

10 Tips of Staging Yards

The author provides some hints and tips for how he has dealt with designing and building a storage yard for his layout, covering benchwork, how to position turnouts, dealing with the height of switch motors and multi-deck set-ups, electrical connections, and occupancy detection.

Tunnel Through the Wall

The author describes how he hid an unsightly hole in the wall by modeling a coal breaker plant on one side and a coal unloading shed on the other side. He also describes how he dealt with hiding a pole in his layout, by curving the back drop around it, while the track goes into a tunnel behind it.