Model Railway

Some modellers new to the hobby are understandably daunted at the prospect of adding semaphore signals to their layout. What do they do? How do they work? what are the different colour semaphores signals for? What are upper and lower quadrants?...

Ballast comes in varying degrees in coarseness, fine medium and coarse. For OO scale the most realistic would have to be medium. OO gauge is 1/76 scale so measure a few ballast stones and multiply the size by 76 to check whether it would be...

All Hornby track is compatible with Peco track. There is a misconception that different brands will not work together. This is not the case as all track for OO scale has 16.5mm spacing between the track. There is a small difference in colour of...

It is not essential to use an underlay for your layout, but it is definitely a good idea as the underlay will help to suppress the noise of your trains when running around the layout. The underlay absorbs vibrations of the train running so you...

There is a slight difference is size but both run on the same width track (16.5mm). As for the scale, OO Scale is 1/76th which is 4mm per foot, whereas HO Gauge is 1/87th that is 3.5mm per foot. For scenery, the issue is non existent as plants...

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...

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...

Three link couplings are exactly that: they are three links of chain that will connect your wagons. These "loose" couplings were used in Britain on low speed trains till the 1970s. These trains did not have any automatic braking system and...

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...

There are three common model railway scales, these being N Gauge, OO Gauge and G scale; although there are several other scales the smallest being Z Gauge with a gauge width of 6.5mm and a scale of 1/220. N Gauge is the smallest most common with...

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...

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...