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Tips & Tricks for Toy Train Operators By Peter Riddle 100+ Detailing hints elect
Tips & Tricks for Toy Train Operators By Peter Riddle Detailing hints, electrical tricks, performance tips, scenery shortcuts. 100+ tips. 1994 Soft Cover 80 pages
Recently I tried to estimate how many layouts I have built over nearly half a century of fascination with miniature trains. The total must be measured in dozens, even if you don't count the temporary Lionel empires that wound beneath the furniture in my bedroom when I was but five years old.
My first serious effort came before I was in my teens: a round-the-wall tinplate pike on benches provided by my dad in the basement of our home. Upon entering high school I, like so many other teenagers in the 1950s, abandoned my Lionels in favor of the scale realism of HO. Throughout college I managed to find time to assemble a few kits and buildings in my dormitory room, even though I had no place to run them.
Graduation and marriage to my wife, Gay, followed our college years. Our first home was small, but we did have a small point-to-point HO pike.
There followed a succession of career changes for us both, necessitating a number of moves, followed by post-graduate study, and finally a relocation to the Province of Nova Scotia, where I most recently served as Director of the School of Music at Acadia University. Every home, rented or owned, had a train room of some description, and with every move the layout was completely dismantled, only to be reborn in a new format at the next address.
Gay and I sold our entire HO scale collection in 1984, having rediscovered the joys of toy trains. Since that time we've created at least a dozen tinplate layouts; after all, the joy is in the building, not in the having. Today our basement contains two permanent layouts, one in 0 gauge and one in Standard. The living room holds my wife's fully detailed Lionel Junior empire, a single loop in a fold-out cabinet just 3 feet square.
In my office at the university, a hollow-core door supports a prewar Lionel railroad town over the computer station, and in my wife's office in the Student Center (she's Director of Conference Services), her N scale Chesapeake & Ohio occupies the top of a filing cabinet. We also have a portable pike.
Thanks to all this layout-building, we've picked up a few tricks we'd like to share. I've forgotten the source of most of them, but would like to thank those many anonymous modelers who have shared their knowledge over the years, personally and through the pages of such magazines as Toy Trains, Model Railroader, Railroad Model Craftsman, 0 Scale Railroading, and especially Classic Toy Trains.
There are, however, certain ingenious tricks that came more recently from friends in the hobby, and I have credited these people wherever possible. Some of the ideas are truly original and inventive, and it pleases me to pass them on to you. Others are so obvious that I found myself saying, "Why didn't I think of that?" And finally, some are my own creation, developed from the decades of enjoyment that miniature trains have brought me.
Many of these ideas require no special equipment or supplies. The few needed items can be found in stores at the average shopping mall, and I've tried to steer the reader to sources wherever possible.
Specific toy train items are available from the many suppliers who advertise in the model railroad press or through such clubs as the Train Collectors Association (TCA), the Toy Train Operating Society (TTOS), and the more specialized clubs, such as the Lionel Collectors Club of America (LCCA), devoted to specific brand names. 1 highly recommend membership in these associations for many reasons, among them knowledge and information, buying and trading, and especially the good fellowship of new friends.
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