The December issue of Model Railroader came in the mail yesterday; it features a head-to-head review of two recently released HO 4-8-8-4 “Big Boy” locomotives: an Athearn Genesis and a Precision Craft. Both come with sound; the Precision Craft is die-cast, more detailed and more expensive. Along with the earlier Rivarossi and Trix models, that [...]
Pete Lawson of the Bristol Railway Archive caught this neat shot of a British HST (High Speed Train) in Bristol.
Lee Nicholas’s Utah Colorado Western has been featured in a number of model railroad publications, most recently, I believe, in Great Model Railroads 2005. It’s a freelanced HO layout set in Utah and Colorado (naturally) in 1967. Lee’s web site is quite extensive, and includes photo galleries as well as pages on construction, scenery and [...]
Speaking of Amtrak, they reported their fiscal year 2006 numbers today. Revenues were $1.37 billion — up $132 million, or 11 per cent, over fiscal 2005; ridership was up 300,000, or one per cent, to 24.3 million. Acela ridership and revenues were up, perennial sick man Sunset Limited was down sharply. By route category: Northeast [...]
Everything was in place for expanded Amtrak service in Illinois, with additional trains running to Carbondale, St. Louis and Quincy. Ridership was rising, state funding was doubled for the expansion, and deals were negotiated with the host freight railroads. Service was to begin next Monday. Then Canadian National, which took over the Illinois Central in [...]
Peter Van den Bossche seems to have been following DMU #4403 around Liège, Belgium, and caught this interesting shot of it crossing Horloz Viaduct, with Tilleur cemetery in the foreground.
The original Railroad Tycoon was one of those computer games — most of which were designed by Sid Meier — which earned the label “insidious” from me. The kind of games that you kept playing because you had just one more thing to do, and then suddenly you looked out the window and the sun [...]
An article up on About.com, Geography of Passenger Rail Networks by Brett J. Lucas, divides passenger rail into three categories: commuter, short-haul intercity, and long-haul intercity — a taxonomy that comes as no surprise to those in the know, but conceptually helpful (even if Lucas doesn’t follow through with the analysis as much as I’d [...]
I’ve long been fascinated by rotary snowplows, but most of my exposure has been to steam-powered snowblowers, such as the Canadian variant exhibited here or the kind still used on the Cumbres and Toltec. But I have to admit, I’ve never seen a snowplow like the Union Pacific model in Flickr user davy2kii‘s photo here: [...]
Call it Model Railroading 2.0. LDSIG, the Layout and Design Special Interest Group, has been upgrading its web site from a collection of static pages on model railroad design (their raison d’être), many of which were in a permanent state of under construction, to something a bit more modern, with its content pages powered by [...]
RSS