Model Forum / General / Railroads / February 2010

Hi,

Agreed.

Interesting point of view ;-)

Well, you can buy $80 mainline locos. Which are basically empty inside -
or filled with weight. Basically the same drive, just inside less weight
would make a small loco - I decline to consider "space requirements" a
problem, especially when I consider that there's always room for a
decoder, even in Z scale. So, while there are a few switcher locos to
buy (some of them actually in the below-$100 range), models for American
prototypes are not readily available in Europe (especially in Germany!)
- and the European switchers and DMUs are rather on the expensive side.
And they are difficult to obtain, still, because most of the shops I can
go to don't sell them (I do buy locally as far as possible).

But locos are less of a problem compared to wagons - most of the short
wagons they sell here are either two-axle stock (which I don't like
much) or are loooooong (which don't fit my layout). One of the reasons
for using American-style rolling stock is the fact that only
American-style four-axle short wagons are available. Getting wagons in
DIY-kits is almost unheard-of. The discrepancy between wagons and locos
available in model shops and in the real-world is horrible...

As I said, there's stuff available, but it's rather limited compared to
"the real world" - in reality there's likely as much switching equipment
as mainline equipment - in the hobby stores it's almost exclusively
mainline equipment. Probably this is due to the fact that most people
only "see" the mainline equipment when they think of trains, but know
(or "see") little of what's going on behind the scenes.

So big stuff sells - even if it doesn't even fit the super-small pizza's
of the starter packs - mainline loco and two or three big wagons occupy
a third of the track they provide in the box! Don't look to closely at
the "train" from the outside of the curves :-(

Yeah, well, the world is a bad place to live - too many people, too
little brain ;-)

Just as an on-season joke, I'm happy my model train layout is situated
in summer/fall - I'd go crazy trying to model all the failures and
delays that the real trains seem to be experiencing - and the winter's
not even bad here... Every time a snow flake is lying cross-wise on the
tracks, there's a delay...

Ciao...

On 1/29/2010 9:28 PM LDosser spake thus:

I would if I had a layout. I loves the look of a huge steel plant.

For some outstanding examples, check out Charles Scheeler's 1930
photographs of Ford's River Rouge plant, complete with its own steel
mill and foundry. Magnificent structures ...

I haven't seen the latest Walthers flyer (they don't seem to want to
send them to me, and I've been too busy to get to the LHS), but I'd
expect a model of an inspection pit to have some form of access so the
workers can actually get down and up.  If the "model" is indeed a hole
in the ground, then my comment can safely be ignored as "technically
right, but not what we're talking about." ;-)

Puckdropper