Model Railway

After the transport act of 1947, the railways were nationalised and control given to the British Transport Commission (BTC) the following year, the new organisation was to be called British Railways.In the early years of British Railways,...

Imagine a 21st-century world where the computer chip or electronics had not played a dominant role in the progression of technology, and the steam power and industrialisation of the 1800s had continued to develop to deliver everything from home...

Felix Pole was an ambitious employee of the Great Western Railway. Born in 1877, by the age of 27 he was working in the headquarters at Paddington Station and by the age of 44 was appointed General Manager.During that time, one of Pole's many...

Point rodding is a system of rods and bars that physically joins the lever of a signal box or ground frame with a set of points. They were a feature of manual signal boxes during the days of steam and could be seen running alongside railway tracks...

ELC couplings (also known as Elsie couplings) are the standard couplings found on N gauge rolling stock, ELC stands for Easy Light and Close.ELC couplings are described as giving outstanding reliability, they couple easily when two vehicles...

A ground frame is a bank of point levers placed at the trackside to operate nearby points or emergency crossovers and are generally found in remote locations too far away from a signal box to be connected by traditional rodding or wires.The...

5 and 7 plank wagons are a type of railway wagon design dating back to the early 1900s. They are a simple design of open wagon (featuring no roof) comprising a metal framework encompassing wooden sidewalls, the height of the wagon's sidewalls is...

In 1955 an act commonly known as the 'Modernisation Plan' was passed with the intensions of modernising British Railways.The railways of Great Britain had been under government control since privatisation in 1948, but they were still using...

EMF stands for Electromotive Force and requires a fair knowledge of electrics to fully grasp what it is and the effects that it has on motors and circuits, the problem is that most explanations often contain quite advanced terminology or at the...

EMU stands for Electric Multiple Unit and is a type of passenger train where most or all of the carriages has its own electric motor negating the need for a regular locomotive to provide traction.EMUs have been around since the late 1800s and...

If you're not electrically minded, the thought of installing solenoid point motors to your layout for the first time can be a little bit scary but don't worry because when you have done it once, it's really quite easy.The circuit you'll have...

A sheet rail, more commonly referred to as a tarpaulin bar or longitudinal bar, is a metal bar that is suspended above a railway wagon to support tarpaulins.Some early wagons were built with raised semi-circular end panels to support and...