Model Railway

The best way to check the wheels of your locomotives is to use a tool called a back to back gauge. They are available for all scales/gauges. They are made of brass and you simply slide it over the axle and the back of the wheels. If it proves...

Voltage drop is the decrease of voltage in an electrical circuit. On a model railway layout and it layman's terms, it is when the current can not make it all the way around the track. This is mostly caused by the resistance of the track and...

One easy way is to get yourself a Peco cleaning kit containing a wire brush, wheel scraper, foam cradle and oil. The foam cradle allows you to turn your loco upside down and give support while cleaning the wheels, or any other form of...

It goes back to the old saying: you get what you pay for. The more expensive locomotives out there have slightly better detailing when it comes to paint and overall finish. You can feel the quality when you hold them. They are also usually...

Peco manufactures two types of track: - Set-Track is the standard geometry range, similar to the one used by Hornby. The range comprises curves, straights, crossings and points. - Streamline is the extended range with wider radii for the points...

The purpose of signals is to let the driver know if there was another train on the line, pretty much the same as traffic lights on the roads. These are vital to avoid collision, before the days of signals it was done by telegraph and hand, there...

DCC ready means that the loco is designed to be fitted with a DCC chip. At the factory a small piece of circuitry is added to the loco with a socket that enables you to insert a DCC decoder to convert the engine from analogue to DCC. It is quite...

A ballast spreader is a plastic box about two inches square. On the base, there are two grooves that sit on the rails. Inside the spreader there is a slanted piece of plastic with three slots in the base, one in the centre and one either side and...

For an analogue system, the maximum voltage supported by the engines is about 12V. Most analogue controllers will deliver a bit more but constantly running your engines with 13V or even 14V may damage their motors (and does not look very...

P4 (also known as Protofour) is as true to the scale of 4mm to 1ft (1/76 scale) as you can get, giving a true representation of a properly scaled OO gauge railway. This is what OO gauge should have been in the first place rather than manufactures...

For the past 50-odd years, all Hornby Railways products have been assigned a product code starting with R. The numbers are roughly sequential, with higher number meaning more recent releases. You could expect the letter to have been H for Hornby...

This depends on what type of figures you are using for your layout. If you are using white metal figures they often come with spikes on the bottom of their feet, so it is just a case of sticking them in to the base. However if you plan to put...