A bow pen also known as a ruling pen was designed in the early 1900’s for draftsmen for drawing straight lines of different thicknesses. These pens resemble a fountain pen to a certain degree with two tapered metal foils coming to a point and...

Although both a vertical cutter and a standard one do the same job, they do have different purposes. The vertical track cutter allows you to cut track which has already been secured to your base board whereas the standard cutters allow you to cut...

There is an unwritten rule that you do not mix enamel and acrylic paint as they are completely different in their makeup, enamel being a solvent based paint and acrylic being water based paint. In all my years of modelling I have never tried to...

The term permanent way refers to the ballasted track. This is what is usually called in the UK the railway track and in the US railroad track. It encompasses the rails themselves, the sleepers (or ties in the US), fasteners, chairs and ballast as...

Next18 is a DCC decoder standard that is smaller than existing decoders and designed to fit in to locomotives that have limited space, such as N gauge engine and and OO gauge steam engines. The maximum size of a decoder is about 15mm x 10mm. The...

Traditionally gravel ballast has been the forerunner for track beds in railway modelling and gives your layout an authentic look, and is still used as the main form of ballasting today. Ground cork ballast is relatively new in comparison but...

When most people think of a model railway, they think of an oval where the train can go around and round. With an end to end layout, as the name suggests, the train runs from one end of the layout to the other and back again. This is a good way...

The smallest commercial scale in railway modelling is T Gauge.  It runs on 3mm track and is 1/450 in scale. It is approximately a third of the size of N gauge.  Because of the small weight, wheels are magnetic to improve traction. Two British...

Despite what most places will say, the voltage on the track when using DCC is not 16V. It is not 15V or 12V either. Actually, as the DCC signal is digital, it is a square wave. Unfortunately, square waves cannot be measured by standard digital...

Gn15 is an exciting scale for smaller projects with quirky or unusual engines and wagon. Gn15 is a combination of garden railway which is G scale  (1:22.5) running on OO gauge track. The 15 in the Gn15 is the width of the prototype track in...

Chipping medium is a weathering agent that creates chipped surfaces to give a more realistic look to your models. It can be added to vehicles or door edges or in fact anywhere that you would expect to find areas of chipped paint. It is very easy...

Mallard is the fastest steam locomotive in the world. This has to be one of the most iconic engines ever, it is 70 feet long and weighs in at 165 tons with the tender. It is a pacific steam locomotive class A4 and was run by LNER. It was built...