I'm starting a new thread to talk about our early memories with Railroads and with our layouts.

Terry, do you have any of that stuff anymore?

Most of us got involved with trains and railroads as children, many with electric trains, others by living close to the railroads and seeing trains pass. Your age has a lot to do with what you saw and what brought you into this pastime that brings us together.

This is a place to relive those memories and share them with us. I've got a lot to say here, but I've got to gather my stories together.  I'll let a couple other people lead off first.

The only switch frogs I have had problems with on my way layout are are the metal ones on the Bachmann number five switches.  They were almost always a hair higher than the adjacent rail.  Enough to make the engine sit on top and balancing, not touching the rail on either side and usually stalling. 

Getting the height of these frogs down is a messy deal any way you look at it.  I very carefully grind them down with a grinder tip in a Dremel tool. You have to be extremely careful to not cut dips in the frog, which I have done a couple of times. There's no real way to gauge this work that I can think of. Maybe someone has an idea.

The switches I have plastic frogs with are atlas products.  The height of these for all of them never been a problem.  However, on a couple of number 4's  in the yard, the little pointy tip on the trailing side of the frog tended to snag the drivers on my decapods, which are really long wheelbase engines to begin with, and remarkably get through these number 4's with not much other problem.

On these frogs, I have gently moved the offending frog point with non-serrated needle-nose pliers very slightly over out-of-the-way toward the outside curve side. I emphasize "very" and "gently."  That seemed to do the job just fine.

No prob, Jeffrey. Good stories are always good stories and I appreciate hearing them.

I have also wondered if this is the 10,000 square-foot union pacific layout in Sedona Arizona that I've heard about.

That problem is found in Bachmann's  track switches, too.  I've had to lower the tops of frogs on the majority of my Bachmann switches. The train will get on top of it and balance and break contact with the rails on either side, causing in aggravating stall until you fix it.

I must be the last one, Kemosabay.

Hi yo Silver.

No other all steam guys besides me? Am I the Lone Ranger?

Seal the insides of all corners etc and paint all inside surfaces black. Otherwise, that building will glow like a radioactive isotope when you light up the inside.

Back to steam era layouts.  I model the steam era because I saw it, at least the very end of it in the early 1950s. For a brief while, all the trains we saw had steam engines, that's all. I remember seeing the first diesels in the area and back then was excited about it. If I'd known how quickly they were going to kill steam I wouldn't have felt the same way.  I very deeply felt the passing of the steam engines, and still cry for them. I really miss them. When I started modeling, nearly all modelers felt the same way. They were adults who grew up with steam, and were fully aware of what was going on at the time of the mass scrappings. They've all passed on now.

But only a very few short years later, I became a model railroader and in 1960 nothing at all had changed on the railroads I knew as a much younger kid.  Only the engines had changed, and the water tank was gone. That was it. And that's what I modeled and still model largely except for no diesels. Right now though I only have 1945 era cars on my layout. Hardly any steel box cars at all and the ones that are there have early lettering schemes. A few months ago I had only 1925 cars on there.

If you do 1910, you can't have any USRA steam engines on the layout. In fact, about the only engines you can put on there that are available stock right now are the Bachmann 10 wheelers and the consolidation, the Athearn roundhouse steam engines, and maybe some of the Broadway limited Pennsylvania engines.... Although those are only good on Pennsy layouts. I love steam locomotive builders photographs from that particular time. The engines were very clean with not much plumbing, most of them still had high mounted headlights, and various compound engines with oddball cylinders were quite the rage at the time.  You have to be a good scratch builder or kit basher to get a good roster of engines in that time.

Jeffrey, you're not the only one who has thought about doing a 1910 layout. The railroads were king then. It's the time when my father was born, and my grandparents were young adults. If only I had known what to ask them about almost anything when they were still alive way back.

It's hard to imagine a time when they were literally no roads between towns to speak of at all, that the roads were the only way to get anywhere at all. But, you could go everywhere by train back then. And the passenger trains were beautiful with 80 foot long truss rodded wood varnish cars with arched stained glass transoms over the windows.  And, one of my uncles who was originally from Ohio used to tell me about riding the interurbans back then. If only I had gotten to do that, or even more thoroughly quizzed him about it.

I even thought about doing a layout in black-and-white. No colors on anything, just shades of white and gray. To look like the black-and-white photographs we have of those times . Now THAT would be a challenge.

That particular era, of course, is not blessed with a lot of model engines and equipment though. Plus you'd have to modify figures to have period costumes. And most of your vehicles would have to be horse drawn. On largely unpaved streets. Lined with telephone poles with eight or 10 crossarms full of clear and green glass insulators carrying copper wires. Most of the buildings, at least down in my native south, were beautiful old wood frame buildings almost all gone now. Porches, tall double hung windows, gingerbread woodwork, and get this ... many went unpainted as you can see in photos. Ready mix paint didn't exist then in the painter was available was very expensive.

Someone has actually done a very elaborate layout like this.  But I can't remember the name or website anymore. He had all of the features that are listed and more, and would even photograph it in black-and-white.

I may have done this on the old forum. If, so, forgive me, I slip sometimes.

Log in and comment if your layout is strictly all – steam locomotives. I'm talking about Standard Gauge Railroading the way it was was in the mid 1930's or so.  No diesels on your rail, period. Yes, I know there were a few diesel-powered streamliners around in the mid-1930s. They are not a discussion issue.

I'm also not counting narrow gauge railroading like in Colorado which is nearly always all steam.  I am interested in those folks that model classic American golden – age railroading before diesels appeared. People like me, who don't run one single diesel, ever. I suspect the list will be pretty short.

That's unfortunate about no more sound, I'm disappointed.  I myself like to install high end full-featured Soundtraxx decoders but I always buy engines that already have sound that I can run for awhile before paying a tech to do an install.

I have plenty of steam engines, nearly all Bachmanns and good performers, but there's always room for another.  I was looking at the upcoming ATSF Pacific No. 1344 as a companion to the one I already have, the 1385. But it may wait a while now.

When one track crosses another one without connecting switches, it's called a crossing. A crossover is two switches facing each other so a train to move from one parallel track to another parallel track.

All sectional tracks like EZ track have plastic frogs, that is where rails of opposite polarity actually cross one another.  Wheels that pick up power can't get power when on top of a frog. So the other wheels pick up power from whatever metal rail they're on top of.

Wheels and/or track can get dirty and compromise power pick up on the remaining wheels that aren't on the frog.  I believe you have either dirty wheels or dirty track. HO trains are not heavy like the old large, electric trains of generations ago. Those trains were no problem whatsoever with dirty wheels or track since they had so much weight on the rails.  Comparatively, HO trains are very light, and it doesn't take much to disrupt power distribution to the train. People don't understand that wheels and track need continual cleaning to operate properly.

Look up on the Internet Model Railroad locomotive wheel cleaning and track cleaning. There's more information there than you care to read. Pick a method that suits you and clean everything. You probably will get satisfactory operation after that.