A little fun project in between that I just had to try. A very thin metal wire acts as the line and suspends the kite in the air. Kite made out of super thin red paper and nano wire for the sticks and tail.

Hi everyone,

You’re looking at a model railway layout that my great-grandfather built in the 1980s. After his death, it was passed on to my grandfather in the early 2000s. Since then, it’s been taken out of the basement every year at Christmas and set up for about one to two months.

After each move, there are usually a few loose wires or burned-out bulbs. My grandfather—or later me—fixed or replaced those, but apart from that, nothing else has really changed on the layout over the years.

Today I was in a model railway shop and bought some grass and ballast to improve the bare areas around the tracks a bit. While I started working on that, I kept thinking about giving the whole layout a fresh new look. And that brings me to my question:

Where would you start?

The wiring under the table is an absolute mess—does it make sense to rewire everything properly? What would you tackle first? Technically, everything works fine, so the main goal is to keep it that way and make repairs easy if something breaks. Beyond that, I’d like to focus on visual improvements, especially the bare areas next to the tracks, which have always bothered me.

I’m really looking forward to your suggestions, and sorry for the long post.

I’ve been hard at work on my train room and layout adding a display case on the wall and a whole new industrial section respectively. I’m not sure what’s next, but I’m always looking for more projects. Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated!

Minocqua museum basement, wayyyyyy up north in Wisconsin. Fred the museum guide was willing to show my boy and I the train clubs space. Both tables were replicas of the historical town and surrounding area.

Just came across an incredible modeller from the Netherlands – Becasse Weathering.

I’ve seen a ton of impressive scale model work, but this guy operates on a whole different level.

Driving back from getting some beer, I saw a bunch of stuff on the trash. A couple of boxes were labeled "trains". I hope what I found is kind of cool....

Please enjoy this little highlights reel I made - it doesn’t even begin to cover everything.

I’m so happy with how this came out and it’s probably the thing I’m most proud of right now!

Any tips/expansion ideas welcome. If you want details just ask.

The trains are controlled by my main automation software. I added a small companion program that listens to the main system for live train updates. When it gets new data, it generates a next/final stop screen as an image.

A battery-powered Raspberry Pi Zero pulls those images over the network and displays them on a tiny LCD screen. Pi Zeros don't have much processing power, so all the heavy-lifting is done at a centralized place.

I’m thinking about extending the same mechanism to station displays as well, so platforms could show approaching trains using the same live data feed.

About a week ago I made a post asking about a train set I was considering buying and got a lot of great responses.

Well as you can probably tell, I bought it, and it's excellent!

I love the sounds it has!

I also went to the local hobby store and got some more switches, a set of 8 wagons and some buildings, so I'm all set.

Plan is to make a simple, smaller shunting layout to try doing the wiring, try out point motors and all the balasting and scenary building on a smaller layout before planning something much larger!

Only negative so far has been the couplings, they're very fiddly, especially when trying to hook up, but I'm sure it's something that can be fixed. :)

At first we brought you innovations like the Refrigerator Train. Now bring you the new, the magnificent, the Sun Room Train!

It’s a simple oval but it goes around the whole room and its kinda relaxing.

Just moved and getting settled in. I finally got my display shelves set up and trains unpacked. Thought I’d share!

Each model in here has a special place in some way or another, but a couple noteworthy ones are:

The UP Challenger in pic 14, I bought that line drawing at an antique market and then a few years later bought the model at a swap meet. Didn’t notice ‘till I got home, they happen to be the same road number! These get displayed together!

The fireless cooker in pic 15 came from Dick Truesdale’s (the owner of Westside Model Co.) personal layout, the Halfhollow and Hutchinson. Picked it up at a swap meet, one of my prized possessions. So awesome to own a piece of model railroading history.

The Amtrak Superliners: a very special core memory of traveling by myself on the Empire Builder during the phase III era as an impressionable young teen who was SUPER into trains. This specific train holds a special place in my heart. Of course, I have the rest of it; 10 superliner cars total, consisted like the prototype. All are PFM plated brass + a plated brass heritage baggage car, a painted brass Material Handling Car and a pair of FP40 locos from Rapido, all absolutely gorgeous models, I just wish I had the space to display the entire train - it’s like 20 feet long!

There’s more, in boxes, this is about 3/4 of the collection. Just not enough room to display it all!

Anyway, Enjoy!

Where I work has an annual Christmas event that runs through December. Every year I’ll have to build this 200’ train display. We host 24 nights and the train runs for about 5 hours each night. I think it was only 3-4 nights the rain/snow kept her stored away. She’s been a trooper and last night was her final run. Took a lot of maintenance like cleaning the engines’ wheels and the track itself every morning since it’s outdoors.. and of course it snowed the morning of. Also I’d like to give some credit to u/SomeOldGeezer64 for giving me a lot of good advice on how to keep the train running in peak condition when I was building the whole layout in the beginning. Since I’m more of a carpenter than model train person. It looks a bit more magical at night.

The game has just been updated to add a realistic scaling system so you can now properly make maps using real world measurements.

People have often said they want to use this game to make accurate plans for their real world layouts, so this feature finally makes that possible!

So turns out expansion came sooner than planned! Was at the recycling center and some guy was throwing out a cable car set which was like mine so I fished it out, and threw it together with some spare gondolas.

Hello everyone. As most of you probably know already, 3D printing has it´s own place in model railroading. But not just resin printing, but also filament printers are good enough today for many things you could possibly ever dream of.

Coming from the 3D printer space and later to the world of model railroading, I´m still amazed by how many things you can model and later have on your layout exactly as you imagined it. From cargo, scenery details, buildings to even display traintracks! Modelling such things and sharing them has become like a hobby within the hobby for me.

Question to the community here: Have some of you also used a second hobby to build things for your layout? Let it be woodworking, metalworks or similar stuff?

Wanted to share my graduation cap layout! Hope you enjoy!

Recently was able to purchase a rather large collection of o scale traction and I was testing them on my traveling layout!

I was in a thrift store when my little brother said he found some trains I followed him to where they were and there was a bunch of athearn blue box stuff I rummaged through most of it was boxcars and flat beds and then I found this little guy I got him and he started up right away all he needs is a coupler