While rooting around for my WIF car, I uncovered a mysterious unbuilt Athearn blue box kit containing an apparent custom-decorated steel 40' reefer with silver ends/roof, dark olive or PG sides with v

After a solid week of seeking and hearing advice -both bad and good- re: "What To Do" re: collected railroad and railroad-hobby periodicals and paper ephemera here is what I did and why: 1) Everything

Steve Hedlund comments- Yes.... I too once applied these very attractive WIF Champ decals (no logo) to a Kurtz-Craft PS-1 boxcar, and the car still resides ("somewhere") within the confines of this ro

Bill, you could not have pleased me more by including the Tobin scheme. Tobin was an Albany, NY packer who expanded into Iowa, eventually selling out to Morrell and .....(help me, Doug!). Denny Denny

Can anyone explain or expand upon the new "NMRA-based" periodical indexing system at <http://www.olimpia.com:8084/magazine-index.html> ? This is NOT the renewed Kalmbach system, but is a separate effo

I am engaging in a long overdue periodic rationalizing of my model railroading and railroading-content periodicals. I worry that on weight alone, the flooring will give up the ghost, perhaps even befo

Mike writes- Amen. The free display of models was and is one of the very best and most healthy features of Prototype Rails, the only flaw of which was that one participant's fine models took up an ent

This was my 11th attendance. Jeff's good sum-up says most of it, and I will not repeat. The best part of this meeting is the relaxed culture and sociability, abetted each year by Mike's original dictu

Friends, I urge everyone who has taken part in the Shake/Take kit-bashing (hate that term, but love the concept!) project this last year and who will be immanently attending the Cocoa "Bash-On-The-Bea

What have listers found to be the most satisfactory materials (and tricks) to use for paper placards, etc. (HO)? Ordinary paper is about 0.005" thick in real time, thus almost 0.5" thick in HO- and it

Re: GOO, Barge Cement, and other contact adhesives: Tim O'C is absolutely right: just read the directions, allow the applied cement to develop contact mode (a few minutes for GOO, 8-10 minutes for Bar

"Drift pins", as commonly used in wood boatbuilding are not tapered, but are long straight rods -silicon bronze or galvanized steel-, with or without heads, that are driven in to predrilled holes prim

In a personal communication with Jim Hediger at MODEL RAILROADER (Jim is a well known DT&I modeler, and I believe his family worked for the DT&I), Jim -with his permission- states the following: Jim g

One summer, I occupied myself as a lowly laborer in an Estherville, Iowa Morrell meat packing plant. Along with my fellow seasonal workers ("the PhDs". By serendipity, all of us were in grad schools d

For those of you on the list participating in the this cooperative 2009 project from The Bash at the Beach and are unaware of it, note that there is active and productive dialogue going on on the Yaho

I did not know Larry Jackman, although I did meet him briefly one time. He could be abrasive at times in his posts, but his experiences as a real life on-the-ground railroad operations employee always

Yes, they certainly do, but Solvaset is much more powerful. Because of this, you have to be very careful with its use on some decal papers (MicroScale comes to mind). At the same time, it is also the

Tim's solution is an excellent one that certainly gets my attention. The Athearn coupler boxes are so inherently unstable that replacing them alone is a giant leap forward. Like all the small couplers

Doug Harding's report is invaluable, and it surely caused a lot of recall about my own family's experiences with cattle shipping from Ida Grove, IA, on the CNW's Carroll - Onawa-Sioux City line, the r

Doug Harding on this list may well have wisdom on this subject. Denny Denny S. Anspach MD Sacramento