Enhance your layout with digital command control! This collection of articles and columns from Model Railroader magazine's "DCC Corner" takes the reader through a series of DCC projects, including setting up a DCC layout, decoder installation, lighting effects, sound effects, layout wiring projects, advanced decoder programming, and tips and ideas for advanced DCC projects. For beginners and experts alike, this book includes tips, techniques, and photographic instruction. Also includes a glossary and a list of important considerations for choosing a DCC system.

Lionel is the king of electric trains, and its collectors are among the most loyal of any collectibles consumers. This handy, full-color guide gives collectors what they've needed for a long time - - a guide to bring to shows, club meetings and on shopping trips to the hobby store. This expertly written pocket-size reference helps readers: - Easily identify various models using 250 detailed color photos- Fine-tune their Lionel Train knowledge with 2,000 listings- Confidently price trains using the three grades of current market values featured in this book- Be savvy consumers in the more than 2,000 daily online auctions devoted to Lionel TrainsPortable and precise, this comprehensive guide is a must-have for any Lionel Train collector.

Includes bibliographical references.

Doug and Andy are unlikely best friends--one a loner obsessed by his model trains, the other a popular student involved in football and theater--who grew up together and share a bond that nothing can sever.

Why do grown men play with trains? Is it a primal attachment to childhood, nostalgia for the lost age of rail travel, or the stuff of flat-out obsession? In this delightful and unprecedented book, Grand Prix legend Sam Posey tracks those who share his "passion beyond scale" and discovers a wonderfully strange and vital culture. Posey's first layout, wired by his mother in the years just after the Second World War, was, as he writes in his Introduction, "a miniature universe which I could operate on my own. Speed and control: I was fascinated by both, as well as by the way they were inextricably bound together." Eventually, when Posey's son was born, he was convinced that building him a basement layout would be the highest expression of fatherhood. Sixteen years and thousands of hours later, this project, "the outgrowth of chance meetings, unexpected friendships, mistakes, illness, latent ambitions, and sheer luck" was completed. But for Posey, the creation of his HO-scale masterpiece based on the historic Colorado Midland, was just the beginning. In Playing with Trains, Sam Posey ventures well beyond the borders of his layout in northwestern Connecticut, to find out what makes the top modelers tick. He expects to find men "engaged in a genial hobby, happy to spend a few hours a week escaping the pressures of contemporary life." Instead he uncovers a world of extremes-extreme commitment, extreme passion, and extreme differences of approach. For instance, Malcolm Furlow, holed up on his ranch in the wilderness of New Mexico, insists that model railroading is defined by scenery and artistic self-expression. On the other hand, Tony Koester, a New Jersey modeler, believes his "mission" is to replicate, with fanatical precision and authenticity, the way a real railroad operates. Going to extremes himself, Posey actually "test drives" a real steam engine in Strasburg, Pennsylvania, in an attempt to understand the great machines that inspired the models and connect us to a time when "the railroad was inventing America." Timeless and original, Playing with Trains reveals a classic, questing American world.

Designing a successful model railroad calls for much more than drafting a trackplan and arranging benchwork. Creating realistic towns, industries, and "work" for your trains to perform will improve any layout, regardless of its size, scale, or gauge. Within the pages of Realistic Model Railroad Design, notable Model Railroader Magazine columnist Tony Koester offers insight into making plausible choices for the concept and construction of your own great model railroad. Photographs of his own layouts, and those of other respected modelers, illustrate his concepts throughout. Open up the pages of Realistic Model Railroad Design, and you'll find a wealth of helpful and insightful concepts to get you on the road to designing your own realistic model railroad. Book jacket.

The new Standard Catalog of Lionel Trains 1945-1969 is the most complete book of its kind available. With 1,100 photos, meticulous descriptions, accurate current-market pricing, and helpful scarcity ratings, it is a thorough, comprehensive, and easy-to-read encyclopedia covering the heyday of Lionel. Author and Lionel collector David Doyle has called upon his wealth of experience as a writer, hobby store operator, and Lionel expert to assemble the ultimate resource for postwar Lionel train enthusiasts. Book jacket.

After more than a century of producing top-notch toy trains, Lionel products are today more technologically advanced than ever, helping Lionel maintain its status as an icon in both the toy and hobby industries. While several books have covered Lionel in