Track
You spent all that time adding detailed structures and beautiful scenery to your layout, so why not build a track to match? We’ll help you do that with these step-by-step lessons on designing, constructing and maintaining realistic model railroad tracks.
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9:34Super Detailing the Main Line
The main line of your layout may just be tracks and gravel, but you can do a lot of things to detail it, creating scenes that make it special. Modeler Martin Tärnrot hopes this video will inspire you to get creative with your main line. MATERIALS Martin is working with Line Side Set #LINE-0002 for…
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7:30Homemade Pro-Level Ballast
MRA Contributing Editor Martin Tärnrot makes homemade professional-level ballast. If you have a large layout, you need a substantial amount of ballast. By using this method, you reduce the ballast cost by at least 70%. (For a video about laying the road bed, tracks and ballast, see Martin’s “How To Ballast Fast and Easy.”) BUYING…
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10:01Trackwork: Building a Helix
A helix is a spiral-shaped piece of track and road bed that transports a train from one level to another on a model railroad. Depending on what kind of configuration you have on your layout, a model railroad helix can either be placed inside a mountain and thereby hidden, or placed in an adjoining room.…
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9:09Hacks and Tricks for Reliable Operation
Martin Tärnrot presents some hacks and tricks to improve the performance and reliability of your model railroad, focusing on three important areas: trucks and wheels, couplings, and tracks. TRUCKS AND WHEELS Why replace wheels? If you have plastic wheels, you’ll get a lot of operational benefits in terms of increased reliability by changing to metal…
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12:01Powerbus Made Easy
Martin Tärnrot assembles a Powerbus. What is Powerbus? You need to have track feeds on multiple places along the line to maintain good quality of the digital control signal coming from your command station. Otherwise the engines will not listen to the commands because the quality of the signal is too poor. Typically you route…
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16:46Fine-Tuning Turnouts with Ron Marsh
As model railroaders, we strive to build smoothly running, reliable railroads, but sometimes common turnout issues can occur along our railways. In this video, Ron Marsh will share his knowledge on diagnosing the root cause of your turnout problems and provide a few easy fixes. Common problem areas are in the point rails and frogs…
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6:26Hyper Elevation with Martin Tarnrot
In this video lesson, modeler Martin Tarnrot will demonstrate how to take the appearance of trains moving through curves to the next level by creating stunning hyper elevation. This hyper elevation, or the appearance of trains banking in a curve is achieved by gluing spacers under the outer rail. Martin uses Evergreen strip styrene for…
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7:11Working with Curved Easements with Martin Tarnrot
In this video with modeler Martin Tarnrot, he will discuss how to add curved easements. This adds to the appearance of the railroad and the functional reliability. The subroadbed is a 12 mm thick plywood sheet. This first step in laying the track is to mark the centerline of the track. He uses a homemade…
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6:22Ballasting Track with HO Scale Ballast
Josh Clark is at his father-son Norfolk Southern HO scale layout to demonstrate a quick and easy method of ballasting track. Even though Josh will be working with HO scale ballast in this video, the same techniques can be used for other scales. For this project, Josh uses a paint brush to spread the ballast,…
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