Submitted by rjenkins on Sat, 2018-02-03 12:07
If you ever find yourself deciding to build a steam locomotive from scratch, one of the challenges you might face is making a boiler shell for it. Of course there are shortcuts if, for example, the locomotive you are modeling can be kitbashed from an existing model, or it has a straight boiler that scales out close to a standard pipe size. The ready-made options can be pretty limited though, and if the engine you're building has a pronounced taper to the boiler, sometimes you really have no other choice but to roll your own.
Submitted by rjenkins on Thu, 2014-01-09 01:18
Thanks to the popularity of Aristo-Craft and USA Trains, 1:29 scale has become the de-facto standard for modeling standard gauge on 45mm (G scale) track. However, for those of us who run live steam, most of the available standard-gauge locomotives from Aster and Accucraft are in the more traditional (and gauge-accurate) scale of 1:32. Unfortunately, the selection of ready-to-run 1:32 scale rolling stock is rather limited. Accucraft/AMS makes a nice 1937 AAR boxcar these days, and MTH large scale rolling stock (also nominally 1:32) is still readily available.
