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Description Size: Approx. 140 mm or 5.51″ inch (H) Scale: 1:48 -1:87 Made of Grass Flocks. Tree branches can be altered to desirable shape. Special coating treatment in tree branches to increase reality.
Have you ever noticed that any lights in your scenery may not seem quite as bright or move slower than they used to? There is a good chance you are hooking too much up to your transformer, this is especially common as you build out your scenery lights over time. There are two possible solutions to the problem. One, you can buy new, more powerful transformer. Two, you could buy a second, inexpensive transformer and have it dedicated to powering only your scenery. I personally, prefer the second option as I believe it gives me more options when it comes to eventual expansion.
Mixing eras is one of the things that seems to separate the serious hobbyist from the casual hobbyist. It’s pretty easy to maintain a singular era when you are working with a single train, more so if you bought that train with the cars and track as part of a kit. However as you add to your collection of cars you may start to find that you are adding cars from eras that may not necessarily match with era of the engine. In the grand scheme of things this is a pretty insignificant nit to pick, and as always you should build the type of train that is most enjoyable for you. However, as you find yourself getting further absorbed into the hobby of model trains and railroads you will find that you want to strive more and more for era authenticity.
Another factor that can cause disconnects in era authenticity is in your scenery, this tends to be even a bit more subtle as scenery is the secondary concern for most model train enthusiasts. If you’ve decided your era to be round the 40’s or 50’s but have a Ford sedan in a 70’s body styling things will seem to be a bit off. It usually easiest to at least go into the model train hobby with at least some kind of idea of what era you seem to gravitate towards, is it the majestic steam engines of yesteryear or the modern efficiency and understated elegance of today’s diesel work horses? Regardless of which era you prefer there are multitudes of cars and scenery accessories that you can purchase to stay within your given time period. Below you’ll see a piece of scenery where the creator has worked to ensure that his scenery maintains a the proper era between road cars and buildings. Small vignettes of activity like this in your model will help you make sure that your model keeps and overall consistency in its time period.
Era specific scenery
I’ve been away for a little bit, and to anybody that was just starting to get into my blog as it was getting off the ground I apologize. I had to move my blog to a new server.
Okay, enough of that, let’s get onto the trains! Actually this is going to be just a teaser of a post. I am working a longer article about track ballast and it isn’t quite finished but I’m eager to be writing again. So what is ballast? Ballast is defined as a heavy substance placed in such a way as to improve stability and control. When you see train tracks the ballast is the rock between the actual ties and the dirt ground. The rocks provide added stability and control, stability and control that is probably good to have when there is a locomotive weighing around 200 tons. Now in our model train world we don’t need the ballast for stability, although it doesn’t hurt. In the model train world ballast is used primarily for added realism. I’ve included a picture below and I am working on a more comprehensive posting about the actual technique for laying ballast.
Oh, and if you are wondering your local hobby shop probably supplies ballast.
Model train ballast