Heard that model railroading is expensive? Don’t believe it. For the price of some tube acrylic paints, a few pieces of extruded foam insulation board and a few sticks of balsa, Bob Roegge has assembled a fabulous operating train layout. His locomotives are scratchbuilt from cardboard tubes and inexpensive Bachmann toy trains, with cellphone batteries and “dead rail” radio-controlled electric circuits. The rolling stock and buildings are mostly made with used cereal-box cardboard and balsa-wood strips, with Bachmann On30 trucks for wheels. The track gauge is the same as HO standard gauge, but the scale is 1/24, where the HO gauge scales out to about 15 inches – close enough to the 18 inches that were common on some industrial and mining railroads. Since all the locos are dead rail, there are no wires under the layout, except for a couple of sound modules to make waterfall noises and such.
Another quick video of Bob’s layout can be seen here: o
For more train videos, both model and real, see the rest of this channel @muchfunwithtrains