There's been quite a bit of chatter in regards to Bachmann locomotives recently. I'm just curious mind you. Are they still being made with rubber traction tires, or have they finally discontinued that practice? For the prices they are asking for I would hope that the rtt's are a thing of the past. While I do have a few of the older ones, they WILL be junked, gutted, scrapped, mangled, wrecked and terrorized into something, other than a running locomotive. Since 1988 all my locomotive purchases have had metal wheels.

The Railway Modellers Meet of BC was held this past weekend in Burnaby at Simon Fraser University. North of 100 registrants took part in 3 days of operating sessions, layout tours, clinics and camaraderie.  I was part of the organizing committee so it was really nice to see everyone's hard work pay off.  A few of my personal highlights in the following post.

I just received this months release of the 60' Gunderson box cars in the new red TTX scheme and compared them to previous releases of this car from Athearn. I like the flatter paint, almost satin finish. The yellow is brighter and the bottom side is all black. Also the trucks aren't shiny, they are more matte than earlier releases of this car.

The other change I noticed is the application of the white Overheight strip on the ends of the car.

Here are some pictures.

A rigorous review of wheel design is described by Tad Daito in the May-June issue of the O Scale Resource on line magazine.  His test of custom "O" scale stainless steel wheels ran two hours a day for 13 years.  http://oscale.uberflip.com/t/62954-the-o-scale-resource   This work is being done in Japan using American prototype models, described thoroughly and bluntly.   His Low-D reduces friction !

A train of over 100 cars weighs 100 pounds and the locomotive pulls 1 amp.