Best practices

How you remove ballast would depend on weather you are trying to remove excess ballast after laying and gluing your ballast, or if you are trying to remove an existing section of track for replacement or re-landscaping.If you are just removing the...

The best coarseness of ballast for N Gauge would be the fine or very fine ballast. This gives a better scale representation for the N gauge layout. If you were to use medium or coarse ballast, this would look out of proportion to everything else...

It is very tempting to use pins or nails to stick the track down but this may not be the best approach. Pins are difficult to fix in place without distorting the sleepers and points. They are also near impossible to hide, meaning your layout does...

Yes, you can use HO figures on your OO scale layout, there is a slight difference in size, but this is negligible in the grand scheme of things. HO gauge is 1/87th that is 3.5mm to the foot, where as OO scale is 1/76th, that is 4mm to the foot....

For O gauge the best ballast would have to be coarse as this has much larger stone chips than fine or medium grade ballast and would be more in keeping with the scale of your layout. Keep in mind that O gauge is 1/43 scale in the UK and 1/48...

If you are modelling a road, you need to know how wide the real thing is so your model can be accurate. Road widths were standardised in the UK in 1993 however there are still exceptions depending on specific circumstances such as having a wider...

Personally, I would never use second hand track as you don't really know what you are getting. Over time track will wear and tarnish and may even rust (for very old track) and its conductivity may become diminished even after giving it a good...

The platform will need to be as long as the longest rake of coaches you are running plus the length of the engine. Many people fall foul of not allowing for the length of the engine but you need to remember the driver needs to get out as well!...

Grain of wheat bulbs are filament based so run hot. This means in certain situation, they have a habit of melting plastic which is not good for buildings or control panels that are made of plastic. They require 6 to 12 volts to run. On the other...

It is not possible to run standard OO gauge trains on narrow gauge track as OO gauge needs to run on 16.5 mm track and OO9 narrow gauge runs on 9mm track, which is the same as N gauge track. OO9 stands for, as the name suggests, OO scale and 9mm....

It is not essential to use an underlay for your layout, but it is definitely a good idea as the underlay will help to suppress the noise of your trains when running around the layout. The underlay absorbs vibrations of the train running so you...

If you are just starting out on your model railway adventure and you are trying to decide what type of layout to build, the best advice would be to go to a model railway exhibition and take a look at the different types of layout that are on...