I was talking to a teacher at my highschool who inherited much of a closed hobby shop in these items were a large amount of LGB so I now want to try bringing up to our school the possibility of building a garden railroad in the courtyard of the school. I feel like this would be a great area as we already have a pond there and it is a place where people go and eat their lunch to. What I want to do here though is see what are some of the challenges of building a garden railroad and how should I go about it.

This is the cad view blue is engrave and red cut, I have made this succesfully and included on the file are a set of 50 with tabs. They are completely to scale in HO made from real plans. For my test cuts I cut them in construction paper with no issues the tabs are 1/32 in. in size.

I want to try scratch-building a small 5 inch long deck/plate girder bridge from styrene I am going to draw up a plan for this and wanted to see some examples of what people have done. I was likely going to do styrene but are there other methods that may be better? I was also considering using laser cut thin plywood but was wondering what would look best along with some examples of these on peoples layouts.

I spent some time drawing up a Tie Plate from real engineering drawings. I noticed some flaws later on so a better more accurate one will be coming soon but here is this one for now:

http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:2566305

You can do whatever you wish with it as a note it is drawn full scale.

I did try browsing around the web on this but can't find anything as to why this works. I see in the MRR guide to basic scenery it says wrap a magnet around the cap of the static grass bottle and it will work simillar to an applicator I have yet to try this and was wondering if it even worked and if so how?

I recently recived a ATSF F7 in the freight scheme. It is the athearn Genesis and has the seperate outputs for the red mars light and normal light there along with the lower headlight with two normal lights. What I want to know is what would be the prototypical set up for this what should turn on when and if it is on should it flash or always on?

So I am typically the type that to save time will type the site link directly, including MRH typing that gets a little long though and I started going through google. Just decided on a whim to type MRHmag.com and found it takes you to the site. That is definitely a great idea and I think also will be better when telling people about the site.

Tahnaks for that and wish I knew sooner though (how many people actually did too I wonder)

So this started as a very exciting thing I got two new Athearn Genesis engines in the ATSF freight scheme (A-B set) from a friend of Charlie Getz's since they were DC though I need to get some decoders for them. But for some reason no store near me has decoders in stock so I have to order them online and wait. I may be able to make it to a store nearby but with the 30 minute each direction it may not happen. I just don't get why they wouldn't even stock the basic ones apparently the reasoning is they say every decoder is different for a specific engine.

I am helping out with a garage sale this weekend at my grandmothers and was thinking I would set up a display of a train running and work on weathering cars throughout the day. I was thinking I would sell the cars for 15-10 dollars each and buy 2 get 1 free. These would only be old tyco cars without kadees or metal wheelsets but would you pay the higher price for the weathering? I may also put out a jar saying tips for model railroad fund.

I decided it would be good to make a post just reflecting on what I have learned and grown in the way of the hobby. I started out just really 4 years ago now (wow I realize it is a lot longer now) in being serious about the hobby. Just the few years ago my track was a oval of Bachmann EZ track with cruddy TYCO DC engines. I went up a little from there with my first nice engine being a Atlas Classic GP7 in the santa fe book end scheme. I still have it and also a matching engine too.