More Lessons from Brio

The kids were restless this morning after painting our faces, and so we decided to build a Brio layout and play trains some more. This gave me a chance to try out some of the ideas I’ve been working through since the last session. In particular, I tried out some ideas with different states for […]

More Playing with Brio

As I mentioned, I am using an enforced break from construction to think about car forwarding. My leaning has been toward something similar to what Tony Thompson has described with car pockets and realistic-looking waybills, and I have Mike White’s collection of Tony’s blog postings on my must-read pile. Probably, Tony is way ahead of […]

Car Forwarding Design – Givens and Druthers

I have a surprise trip this week, and so, there will be no physical work on the layout. To get my mind off the reason for the trip, I’ve been thinking about operations. Specifically, what mechanisms am I going to use to generate freight traffic on the layout? As mentioned before, on a small layout, […]

Operating a Small Layout

A recent comment on the Model Railroad Hobbyist forum has got me thinking about operations. I think that operating a small layout is actually different than just a piece of a larger layout, as asserted in one of the responses. Now, first, I must confess that I’ve very little experience with operating small layouts. There […]

Parked

Before he left this evening, Andrew convinced me that it would be cool to see a train run on the other half of the layout. The only thing stopping it was a layer of glue and paint on the rail heads (I can hear you laughing, dead-rail people). So, I found a scrap of Arborite […]

First Operating Session

What, wait did I skip a few posts? Yesterday, my daughter was sick, and I had to stay home to look after her. She wanted to get out the Brio trains and have a good proper play, which is exactly what we did — for about four and a half hours! Now, ordinarily, I get […]