Links: Shukuzu

The prime mover of the tiny pink world of Shukuzu blogs about his creation. The nascent layout holds promise, and the writing is brilliant. Read it.

Links: Homebrew DCC on the Cheap

Here’s a guy on the cutting edge of modern model railroading. If designing and building your own DCC booster and command station doesn’t establish your model rail electronics creds, I don’t know what does. Lately, Steven’s been experimenting with using the Arduino platform, and churning out some really interesting proof-of-concept circuits for automatic control [...]

New Page: Sources!

I’ve heard from a few people now that they like my wishlist if only because it has a small list of places to buy Japanese model trains. With these comments as inspiration, I have created a dedicated page (linked to in the menu up above) to indexing all the sources I have found. Right [...]

KUMORONEHAFUwhat? Japanese Rail Car Nomenclature

クモハE230? ホキ800? オロネフ24? Japanese rail cars are classified using a katakana coding system. The following two links will help you crack that code: Wikipedia’s guide to the katakana and Plaza Japan’s excellent guide to rail car nomenclature.

Links: Homebrew DCC on the Cheap

Stevenh has designed his own DCC booster from scratch. How cool is that? Better yet, it works with a PC, and he has several for sale. Best of all, he uses his custom booster to drive Japanese trains. Enough said. You owe his site a look.

Links: 1:450

Although my interest lies squarely in modeling Japanese N-gauge—1:150 scale—others desire something…smaller. Much smaller. Like T-gauge—1:450 scale. At this scale, one real meter is very nearly a scale half-kilometer! You could model an entire city in the space of a large basement, without the usual sorts of “selective compression” one would normally need.

T-gauge [...]

Links: Yamanote-sen

I particularly enjoy blogs that document construction projects. Kashirigi’s Yamanote-sen is one of my favorites. He is a fantastic modeler, and his medium of choice is…paper. Even with no room for a layout in his small Vancouver apartment, he’s building one anyway: on a frame built from canvas stretchers, and hung on the wall [...]

Modeling in 1:450—T Gauge (Tゲージ)

People who model H0 gauge think we N-gaugers are nuts for working with something so small. N-gaugers likewise think Z-gaugers as nutters. Well, now Z gauge people have a group to wonder about: T Gauge.

T Gauge is a new scale being pushed by Eishindo, currently the only T manufacturer. Scale is 1:450 [...]

Links: Tomix N Gauge Track

If you haven’t seen the blogroll to the right, I might as well point it out to you now. I select sites to list there based on their helpfulness to the new Japanese model railroader. One of the most helpful of these is Tomix N Gauge Track and Japanese N Gauge Trains, run by [...]