Model trains.

[2dimes]

So, does anyone else like to play with trains?

There is something amazing about a really good set up. I like to hang out at a free-mo meet. One I sometimes go to is in an annual event held in a hockey arena and they put together enough HO scale track it can take an hour or more to get around the whole thing.

http://www.free-mo.org

[HitRed]

This last time I went to a train show was 10 years ago. It was busy and the displays were nice. Mixture of adults into trains and kids into Thomas the Train.

[waauw]

Sheldon, is that you?

[2dimes]

Me? Probably not, it's been suggested I'm not even literate.

Mixture of adults into trains and kids into Thomas the Train.

I like Thomas. My son has one I put a DCC chip in it.

show

Maybe I should pump some money into our hobby and buy a controller for at home. http://www.digitrax.com/products/starter-sets/

[tzor]

Speaking of which I went full cheap mode this Christmas. Plastic Lionel trains, plastic track, battery operated with a remote control device. It forms an oval around the Christmas Tree. The controller is kind of nice. It even has sound effects.

[Dukasaur]

When I was a little kid there was some kind of a museum of technology in Prague that had a huge room filled with toy trains. I could never get enough of that room.

[2dimes]

There is a place called The National Technical Museum in English there and they are developing a railway display. I wonder if that is the same place?

http://www.ntm.cz/en/en-muzeum/sbirkova ... ve-nadrazi

They do have models.

[The ram]

Model trains are the ideal excuse for a paedophile to get close to kiddies.

[tzor]

Most model railroaders want to keep the kiddies as far as possible from his trains. I have even seen small Plexiglas ends around the tables to keep the kiddies from reaching into the model. Model railroading is an "adult" hobby in many ways. (But not in that other meaning of the word.)

[HitRed]

Kids and expensive breakable plastic don't mix.

[tzor]

It's probably best to post this here than in the other thread but one key element in model train layout design (and why certain styles requires certain scales) is what I could effectively call the "one cubit rule." That is to say all parts of the layout have to be reachable from the edge of the table. (In case you need to fix something, grab a derailed train, etc.)

In some cases you can be clever about it. You can have a mountain that you can lift so as to access the area around the mountain. But let's for a moment consider the repercussions about how "deep" you can have a layout from the edge of the table to the center. We will use a 20" span for reference.

O scale is 1:43 so that would be around 70'
HO scale is 1:87 so that would be around 145'
N scale is 1:148 so that would be around 246'

For reference a football field is 160' feet wide. A football field is only a small portion of a football stadium so you would probably need to have an access panel if you wanted to model the railroads that go into (for example) the MetLife Stadium (of course in the larger scale you could have the access panel in the football field itself, but in that case the building would be the whole layout being over ten feet wide in O scale.

The largest yard on the LIRR, Sunnyside yard has a length of a mile and a half which would be 53 feet long in the small n scale. I can't get a good number for the max width but looking at maps I see a ration of 3.5 : 1 so that would mean 15 feet wide in the proper scale. Needless to say, no one is going to model that yard in N scale. In the even smaller Z scale it would only be 10' wide.