Coming in September!
12 Model Railroad Track Plans For A Spare Room, 2nd Edition
New Plans. New Tips. 25 More Pages!
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Just Released!
Student To Master: There has never been a time in our hobby’s history when we’ve had so much information. In addition, that information is delivered through much more useful vehicles. However, what’s missing is a way to prioritize that information and put it into context, to see how the pieces fit together.
Student To Master takes a strategic approach to identifying and prioritizing the core modeling subjects that produce maximum visual impact. It’s about understanding which key skills matter the most and focusing your efforts there. It’s about decision-making and developing an awareness of “landmines” that detract from an otherwise great effort.
Model Railroad Planning and Design
Model Railroad Track Plan Books
Switching Layout Series
Model Railroad Construction Books
Beach Reads
Individual Books By Title
Industry Planning For Modern Era Switching Layouts
The ultimate goal and the direction of this book is to guide you towards creating a balanced and plausible composition of industries that targets your specific interests without sliding to caricature.
We’ll go through a step-by-step process that hopefully will result in a creation that you find more satisfying. These steps will be:
-Understanding your specific areas of interest and layout goals.
-Understanding the characteristics of different industries, i.e. how to “classify them”.
-How to select industry candidates that fit your goals, interests, and space.
-How to weave them into a plausible composition on your available layout surface.
Category: Model Railroad Design Books
Scenery For Modern Switching Layouts
Because of their smaller size, switching layouts afford the luxury of being able to spend a lot more time detailing scenery. This model railroad scenery book is a dig deep dive into detailed scenery treatment along the industrial right-of-way and in industrial parks. It’s a start-to-finish, top-to-bottom, approach starting with composition and color treatment and moving on to soils, gravel lots, grass, track and ballast, underbrush, pavement, waterways, and backdrops.
Category: Model Railroad Scenery Books
How to Design A Small Switching Layout: A step-by-step guide to designing the most versatile of all model railroad types. Learn how to: set priorities, pick the best bench work shape, design secondary track, establish scenery zones, choose the best industries, and more! Two bonus track plans included. Concepts can be applied to layouts of all sizes.
Category: Model Railroad Design Books
How To Build A Switching Layout: A prioritized, step by step, approach to building a switching layout with a powerful focus on the steps that create maximum visual impact. No step left out. Bench work, wiring, structures, scenery, details, and more! To view a YouTube trailer about the book click here.
How to Operate A Modern Era Switching Layout: The title says it all. Everything you need to know to operate a modern era switching layout. How to set up an operating session, car movement strategies, job strategies, prototypical paperwork, prototype rules and procedures, and more! Bonus track plan an operations example included.
Category: Model Railroad Operations
Model Railroading As Art: Model railroading offers the exciting opportunity to be approached in the same way as any other branch of the art world. As such, the same principles can be applied to elevate your modeling efforts to new levels. Follow along as we delve into scene composition, color treatment theory, weathering, backdrops, layout room preparation, photography, and more! Click HERE to order.
Category: Model Railroad Design Books
8 Track Plans For Modern Era Switching Layouts
Building on my popular switching layout series, 8 Modern Era Track Plans focuses on the modern era. Four of America’s great cities, Miami, Brooklyn, LA, and Baltimore, serve as themes for the designs. Included are plans for: BNSF, UP, CSX, Florida East Coast, The Canton Railroad, and New York New Jersey Rail.
Category: Model Railroad Track Plan Books
8 Track Plans For Small Switching Layouts: Eight, easy-to-follow track plans for building small but fun model railroads that will fit in a typical spare bedroom. Each plan is designed to be visually inspiring, easy to build, and fun to operate. Included are a port railroad, modern era themes, and themes from the 1950s.
Category: Model Railroad Track Plan Books
Modeling Miami explores the genesis, history, and thinking behind Lance Mindheim’s three Miami-themed model railroads, East Rail, The Downtown Spur, and East Rail 2. Numerous layout photos included!
Shortlines You Can Model, Vol. 1
Imagine a shortline set in a tropical city where English is the secondary language, and trackside voodoo rituals are commonplace. Palm trees, oppressive humidity, a narrow ship-clogged canal, and one-story pastel-colored structures with peeling paint and murals complete the scene.
Now, take that background image and overlay an arrow-straight, mile-long, spur worked by an aging SW8 in peeling mint green paint running down an often flooded right-of-way to serve a handful of industries clinging to the banks of the river.
Welcome to The Swamp Rat, Miami’s short-lived and largely forgotten shortline.
This richly photographed and engaging backstory serves as a plausible fiction theme for the freelance shortline modeler. The journey starts with the backstory. It then moves on to the design and construction strategies needed to bring it to life.
Stucco and Pastels: A photographic journey through a sliver of America’s Casablanca – Miami’s western river district, produce district, and Allapattah neighborhood. Tour faded pastel art deco structures surrounded by palms and live oaks, rail branches running through narrow, cracked streets, open-air produce markets, and shipping channels reminiscent of a bygone era.
How To Design A Model Railroad:
Organizing ideas into a working layout design is a challenge for modelers. It’s easy to try to do too much or to try to pack too much modeling into a compact space. This book will help you transform your basic ideas of what you want in a model railroad into a workable, realistic track plan and overall layout design that you can then build. This is a hands-on guide to designing and drawing a model railroad that will fit the available space and result in a realistic layout.
A wide variety of topics are covered, including:
- Strategic planning
- Benchwork and track plans
- Design tools
- Common pitfalls
- And much more!
Published by Kalmbach. Order your copy HERE.
Make your model stand out from the rest with this technique-driven book. In 112 pages, I dive into the details of how to create realistic structures. Begin using dozens of tips and techniques on cutting, gluing, painting, and weathering on both kits to assemble, as well as models already on hand. All while avoiding unrealistic shiny finishes and bright colors, focusing on flat finishes, subdued colors, and weathering effects found in real life. The book features: Tips & techniques for building kits & kitbashing, realistic paint colors and weathering effects, modifying structure size/selective compression and more!