Model Railroading

[supro66]

I bet there are a lot of you guys into trains
That is what we had before Guitars
I put mine up again this year that I had as a kid in 1959
S Gauge American Flyers

I think I am going to keep them up all year now and keep adding on



MY AMP SITE
http://www.geocities.com/insp/SUPRO6420.html

[EL34]

Cool looking trains.
I never got into trains, but I did play with them at friends houses.

I was into slot cars big time.

I used to to to Battle Creek MI to a place in a shopping center that had two giant tracks.
It was awesome but I was just a kid in the way, fouling up the track when my car would fly off and break into pieces.

My dad built me a banked track in the basement when I was maybe about 11 years old?
I built my own 1/24 scale stuff and later on I ended up racing two different classes and doing really well.

Fun stuff.

[supro66]

I did slot cars also back in the old days we also had places you could go and race you cars it was a good saturday outing at the Farmers market.

There were shops there you could buy all of you parts

They even had a mud track out side for the bigger Radio Controlled cars back about 1967 to 1970

Here are the states that have tracks
http://www.hoslotcarracing.com/USRaceways.html

That is a 4 foot by 8 foot platform I plan to go 6 foot by 10
and try to get four trains runing at once

[Dynaflow]

 I had a small HO layout my dad put together for me when I was a kid. He had a small HO engine (still around here somewhere and quite old, probably worth something) and another that he built from a kit they had back in the day. Basically all the castings, you paint and assemble which was quite the trick, jewelers screwdrivers and magnifying glasses to screw the stuff together.

 As a young kid my older brother (10 years older than I) was into slot cars, he'd take me along to watch. They had a parts store with two tracks, I donno 6-8 lanes as I recall. They were damn fast I remember that.

  In Sacramento in like late 90's early 2000 I got into RC cars. They had a indoor raceway (Big warehouse) that for a flat rate you could run your cars on they're two tracks. They had a flat track (Dirt oval) and a dirt track with lots of turns and jumps. They'd hold races on the weekends for ribbons and trophy's, they'd get entry money plus sell lots of parts so they were doing pretty good with it. I had some 1/10th scale sprint cars including aluminum wing on top and full nerf bars, stagger on the wheel setup different spring rates etc just like the real deal. Using a 7 cell motor you'd get about 4.5 minutes out of a battery pack, but holy crap they were fast. I also had a few monster trucks I built for the other track. It was fun, but sooooooo expensive I hate to even think about how many les pauls I could have bought with what I spent on that crap.. :D

 If your into live steam and are near Sacramento, CA sometime the State Railroad Museum is a must see. They've got lots of restored locomotives including the biggest in they're collection, one of the last cab forward oil fired steam engines that ran up until the late 50's. Its massive, and massive seems like to small a word for this thing. Dig it, 250,000 TONS is what it weighs... My favorite museum story though was this story the news did for railfest week (they have many steamers come in from all over for the weekend for display). People paid a bunch of money to sit in this tent next to the track, listen to some speeches and wait for a particular steamer to arrive. Well it did and it proceeded to spew oil, steam and kicked up dirt all over the debutantes in they're nice suits and dresses that elected to be stupid enough to get that close to a working steam engine....  ;D ;D ;D

Regards,

Dyna

[EL34]

Cool link, I would love to run some 1/24 scale slot cars again.
Didn't much care for the tiny HO cars, they were real cute though.

The big 1/24 scale cars that you could scratch build were really fun.

[Frankenamp]

On the model railroading thing (just a little bigger): There is a railroading club in Fremont (Niles actually) that is into restoring locomotives and cars (not quite as elaborate as the Sacto organization). They have a few miles of track that they run trains on. One of the last family outings I did with my step-father-in-law before he passed was to spend a Saturday riding the antique train through Niles. Said railroad club also had an event the same day, where on a part of the restored track they were running the track maintenence cars. Think one of those pushmepullyou carts fitted with a little putt-putt motor. Some had them restored to Union Pacific spec and set up just like they were back on the job, and others had them tricked out custom. Nice day to cruise up and down the track- one of the more original hobbies I have seen.

Criminy, but that's a long url!

[PRR]

> Criminy, but that's a long url!

Yeah, well, you found it in Google and gave us the Google URL. 

What you want to do is, in the Google header, "Remove frame{X}" so you get the actual URL, which is often considerable shorter:

http://www.csmonitor.com/2006/1110/p12s02-lign.html

[Justa]

Had a HO train set when I was very young and built paper mache mountains for the train to go through during the winter months.  Got some good electrical experience wiring up stuff and trying to fix the power supplies that never held up for very long.  Also found out what 110VAC can do to your hand a couple of times and the difference in DC and AC when I saw how well a DC engine ran on AC.  Nothing like getting hit a couple of times with 110V to remember the dangers.  I still have a very old Lionel DC power supply for an HO set that was the only one to hold up.  Maybe it will have a new use some day.