Best to reach me andy@... for personal mail. This email I use only for stmfc and bbfcl which I read frequently but it's possible I could miss a personal email. Andy

I coat all my decals with Microscale Decal Film before I start cutting. I've been doing this habitually with MS decals since the 1980s when they made the decal film product available. Any decal that c

The same thing I do when I encounter any incomplete or inaccurate decals... improvise. One thing I'm running into is rebuildings which change capacities and I'm finding NO decals with the correct labe

I never buy anything as a "collector" although sometimes they end up that way. Many Sunshine kits are out of my era, but I like them too much to part with them. As to whether they've been opened or no

Well if he doesn't track sales, and individually serialize the kits, how would he know the person is or is not the original purchaser unless he says so? All of my Sunshine kits were purchased direct a

I do have a few unbuilt Sunshine kits that I probably will never use and that I would like to sell. I guess I should include this caveat in my auction listing..... Andy

I've always thought it slightly odd that no other road built a 4-8-8-4. I suppose had steam ruled for another decade, someone would have built one. Which may have caused it to have another name. Or ma

I found that out the hard way when I painted one side of a passenger car and then did the other side and ends later and grabbed a different bottle. Take a look where the end and side meet: http://www.

I think Athearn got it right on their first run of Genesis F units. Everything else looks too green. Andy

When I painted almost exclusively with Floquil, I often would decal right onto the flat surface. Using Solvaset I usually got away with it too. I eventually went with the Microscale system using their

Last night I supervised my wife painting a resin tank car white - with Scalecoat II. It's only the second thing she has ever airbrushed, model-wise. Didn't have to worry too much about coverage since

I will use Scalecoat every time as long as the color is available. I was an exclusive Floquil guy for many years, but gradually changed over. The problem I have now with Floquil is that they have chan

Ah yes, the middle aged re-entry... I think that is the case for many, but I've never been out of the hobby. Not even when I should have been. Yep, I was playing with trains when I should have been pl

I dunno. I've got a couple thousand sunk into their business. I don't have any say in what they do or how they do it, but what they do and how they do it does affect me. Andy

Yep. I too have nostalgia for the neighborhood hobbyshop. I also have nostalgia for premium leaded gasoline, 427 cubic inch grocery getters, tube amplifiers, GP30s, 4-8-4s, Pullman cars, manned spacef

And yet Horizon cut off a *legitimate* brick and mortar store... why? Because his contact phone was a cell and he didn't have a land line. He got it back, but - still - the requirements are basically

I would not own an LHS because I believe that the business model is dead unless you have a major (as in, Chicago) metro area to serve and/or don't care about making money. I wouldn't be a basement bom

Maybe we should ask new modelers (yes, there are some) how they are getting attracted to the hobby. I think that today - and as always - attraction comes from family involvement, friends, word of mout

DCC Train in Cincinnati did a similar thing. Rather than a retail storefront and the ensuing rent and extraneous costs (like the skim/tribute you have to pay to the strip mall), they located in an ord

The shows have replaced the neighborhood hobby shop as the primary attraction to expose newcomers to the hobby. Of course the big shows tend to only go to big cities - WGH, and GATS before that. Just