Model Railroading!

My beginning in model railroading had a pretty rough start. Although I had a "train set" as a kid, I didn't really start building a layout until my teen years.

A neighbor had this old house that had sat empty for years and she was happy to let me setup a model train layout in it.

The "layout" started out as most do, with a simple oval and a few buildings. As time went by, I added more track and started building scenery. Before I realized it, I had my railroad running all through the house. There were "tunnels" (holes) running through the walls so that my trains could go from room to room and you had to duck under the tracks to get into the house.

I was pretty proud of the layout and had multiple trains running all of the time. Most of the kids around town had heard about it and showed up on many occasions just to watch it run.

Doesn't sound like a very rough start, does it?

But here's where it gets rough! At seventeen I enlisted in the army and was shipped overseas, so my love for trains got put on hold for a while. After three years in the military, I returned home to discover that when my family had moved a year or so earlier, my brother had dismantled my trains to take with them.

Problem was, for some reason known only to him, instead of packing my trains away to await my return; he decided to sell them all for the cash. To this day I don't know what he used the cash for.

Needless to say, we had a few words and my train infatuation spent a little more time on hold.

If you have a model railroading tail, why not scroll down to our "Tell Us About Your Favorite Model Railroad" section and share it with us?

Model railway engines are generally operated by low voltage DC electricity supplied via the tracks, but there are exceptions, such as Märklin and Lionel Corporation, which use AC.

Most of the early models made for the toy market were powered by clockwork and controlled by stop/go and reverse levers on the locomotive itself. Although this made control crude the models were of large enough scale and robust enough that grabbing the controls as they ran around the track was quite practical. Various manufacturers also introduced slowing and stopping tracks that could trigger levers on the locomotive and allow reliable station stops to be performed. Other locomotives, particularly large models used actual steam. Steam or clockwork driven engines are still sought by collectors.

Early electrical models used a three-rail system with the wheels resting on a metal track with metal sleepers that conducted power and a separate middle rail which provided power to a skid under the locomotive. This at first apparently strange arrangement made sense at the time as the majority of materials used for railway models were metal and conductive. Modern plastics were not yet available and insulation was therefore a significant problem. In addition the notion of accurate models had yet to evolve and toy trains and track were generally crude tinplate representations of generic models.

As model accuracy became more important some model systems adopted two rail power where the wheels were isolated from each other and the two rails carried the positive and negative supply or the two sides of the AC supply. Other model systems such as Märklin instead used a set of fine metal studs to replace the central rail, allowing existing three rail models to use more realistic track.

Although DC power with the positive and negative charges on the two rails is the most common method of power, Märklin and Lionel use AC power on the three rail system. American Flyer is another exception, which used AC power on two-rail track.

Early electric trains ran on battery power, because few homes in the late 19th and early 20th centuries were wired for electric power. Today, inexpensive train sets running on battery power are once again becoming more common, but these are generally regarded as toys and are seldom used by hobbyists.

Layouts vary from the very stylistic (sometimes just a simple circle or oval of track) to the "absolutely realistic", where real places are modelled to scale. One of the largest of these is in the Pendon Museum in Oxfordshire, UK, where an EM gauge (same 1:76.2 scale as 00 but with a more accurate track gauge) model of the Vale of White Horse as it appeared in the 1930s is under construction. The museum also houses one of the earliest scenic models ever made - the 'Madder Valley' layout built by John Ahern. This latter layout was built in the late 1930s to late 1950s and brought in the era of realistic modelling, receiving coverage on both sides of the North Atlantic in the magazines Model Railway News and Model Railroader during the 1940s and 50s. Bekonscot in Buckinghamshire is the oldest model village, and also includes a model railway, dating from the 1930s onward. The world's largest model railroad track in H0 scale is Miniatur Wunderland in Hamburg, Germany. The largest live steam layout, with over 25 miles (40 km) of trackage is Train Mountain in Chiloquin, Oregon, USA.

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The size of the engines depends on the scale being used and can vary from around 700 mm (28") tall for the largest ridable live steam scales such as 1:8, down to matchbox size for the smallest ones in Z-scale (1:220). A typical HO (1:87) engine is around 50 mm (2") tall, and 100 mm to 300 mm (4" to 12") in length. The five most popular scales used are: G scale, Gauge 1, O scale, H0 scale (in Britain, the similarly sized 00 is used), TT scale, and N scale (1:160), although there is growing interest in Z scale. H0 scale is the single most popular scale of model railroad. Popular narrow-gauge scales include HOn3 Scale and Nn3, which are the same scale as HO and N, except with a narrower spacing between the tracks (in these examples, a scale three feet instead of the 4'8.5" standard gauge).

The largest common scale is 1:8, with 1:4 sometimes used for park rides. G scale (Garden, 1:24 scale) is most popular for back yard modelling. It is easier to fit a G scale model into a garden landscape and still keep the scenery proportional to the size of the trains running through. Gauge 1 is also popular for garden layouts. 0, H0 scale, and N scale are more often used indoors. Lionel trains in 0 scale (1:48 scale) are popular children's toys.

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Much of the information used here has been researched from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

All text is available under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License.

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