Welcome to the Railroad Guide

This site has material on a variety of railroad topics, both model railroads and real railroads.  It also has materials about collecting model railroads.

This site began with “Guide to Z-Scale”, which was the next generation of material which originally appeared in Greenberg’s Guide to Märklin Z”(Greenberg Publishing, 1990; now out of print). When I gained the copyright to the text of that book, I updated the material and began the web site guidetozscale.com.

Things grew out from there with the addition of information about all sorts of things railroad.

Guide to Z Scale

• A guide to the construction of a model railroad layout with Märklin mini-club model trains. Information includes track components, electrical accessories and design considerations.  Also briefly discussed is Nn3 modeling.  This site section is an expanded and updated version of my old Greenberg book.

Model Railroads

• Discussion of elements on steel mill modeling, especially the Walthers steel mill kits and the Plastruct steel mill kits.
• Discussion on modeling the Chicago Tunnel Company.
• Discussion on constructing the Walthers refinery kit.
• Discussion on indoor Gauge 1 model railroading.
• Discussion on electric traction (in development).

Prototype Railroads

• Extensive coverage on the Galesburg & Great Eastern Railroad, which hauled coal in western Illinois until the early 1960’s.
• Coverage on the Hooppole, Yorktown & Tampico, an Illinois shortline.
• Coverage of Tennessee River ferry operations of the Nashville, Chattanooga & St. Louis.

Model Railroad Collecting

• Extensive coverage on Rokal TT, an electric train manufactured in Germany from 1947 - 1968.
• Extensive coverage on early manufacture of Arnold rapido, an N-Scale model train which began production in the early 1960’s.
• Extensive coverage on early manufacture of Minitrix, an N-Scale model train which began production in the early 1960’s.
• Extensive coverage on Märklin mini-club, the Z-Scale model train which began production in the early 1970’s.
• Single page coverage on other model train lines, many of them obscure.

The Miscellany

• Pages covering different personalities in the model railroad business
• Single pages of information related to other topics covered on this site.

Links

• Links to other useful, related sites.

Thank you for visiting and please enjoy this site.

All material, unless otherwise stated is ©Riley O’Connor, 2012.