Posted on 04/05/2020 5:55:54 PM PDT by ZirconEncrustedTweezers
For me, it is now week three of self isolation. A bum immune system has kept me from leaving my house much, but luckily, I have an absurd array of inane solo hobbies to keep me occupied (plus, you know, writing these blogs), and I’m here to share one of my favorites with you all in these boring times.
This is a 12" x 12" piece of plywood populated with model railroading supplies and $7 worth of Hot Wheels/Matchbox cars that I had sitting around. This is the ultimate sweet spot hobby of dollars spent/time invested, in that it is cheap and will consume your entire life if you want it to. For anyone that’s ever built a model railroad (which is how I learned about this!), these techniques and materials used are all fairly familiar, but I will walk through an abbreviated step-by-step for those of you who are interested.
(Excerpt) Read more at jalopnik.com ...
Cool!
Seriously if you enjoy building, get into Lego.
Infinitely better parts nowadays to build very nice and accurate models, or for custom ideas you can get the exact shapes you want.
And on bricklink.com you can buy any part you want in any color you want, in any quantity you need. Its where adults go to get their brick supplies.
What a good Idea! At first I thought they were model cars. The fact that they are Hotwheels makes it so much easier to do!
I plan on doing model railroad eventually.
Last weekend I cleaned most of the junk off the top of it, and I'll eventually get around to dismantling it. I came up with a plan that fits on a 30" x 80" door (I model in N scale, btw) and offers plenty for operations. But first, I have to get the old layout out of the way...
And for what it's worth, the impetus to start a new layout came when I found this up for sale on eBay.
So clever! I have loved shoebox dioramas since I saw Homer Price and the Donut Machine where the donuts were made out of cheerios
Look on eBay for a copy of the album “Mister D’s Machine”, or look it up on YouTube. With Espee diesels, you just gotta have the sounds to go with em....
What would make it better would be a trailer park and a sharknado.
Didn’t know about bricklink.com.
Cool!
Hey everyone, that was fun!
Given that you can now get sound along with it, I’ve thought about going DCC for a while now. There are a few chips available that simulate the sound of an EMD 567 prime mover (which the prototype GP9 had).
I did not realize it until recently but it turns out that my hobbies are eating in restaurants, going to nonessential businesses and touching my face.
Have always wanted to do model railroading but don’t have the room to do it right.
Excellent! (Phinneous, see the pic.)
2020 -- the year of vision. :)
Once you’ve decided what exactly you want to model, it doesn’t necessarily have to take a lot of space. I have a small N scale switching layout that only measures about 10” x 44”.
That one is based on the Inglenook Sidings switching puzzle, and in fact I’m incorporating a larger version of it in the layout I’m planning.
Now I just have to find a caboose to go with it! And having done a little research, it looks like I can choose between cupola and bay window cabooses for the era when SP used this livery.
I had O27 as a kid and I have built several HO an N layouts over the last 50 years...
I have been looking into doing another one.
There are a lot of new ideas and new technologies.
One new idea is instead of starting from a flat surface
and building up your landscaping,
is to put down several layers of foam board on you starting surface
and cutting/carving “down” into the foam board to give a
more realistic look to the landscape.
As far as new technologies, you no longer have to put insulators
between sections to operate locomotives independently,
you can charge the entire layout,
and you can get locomotives that are wirelessly controlled by individual transformers
no matter where they are on the track.
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