I've really missed the fun and cameraderie of ops sessions lately.

I'd read about remote control capabilities for JMRI, mainly for remote dispatching, but never tried it. For my switching layout here in Southern Ontario I wanted to see if remote engineers could work with me as conductor/brakeman. 

It turned out to be quite easy to set up, and yesterday an engineer in England and another in Australia ran the first 2 trains in my daily schedule.  We ran for 3 hours total between the 2 jobs, in 2 sessions.

We often hear of the "transition era" referring to the final years of steam running alongside early diesels in the mid- to late-1950s.  As someone born post-steam and who prefers to model what I've actually seen, I've never had an interest in basing a layout on that period.  However, there have been many more transition eras since then, and I've found that the opportunity they afford to model the juxtaposition of old against new can add a lot of interest to our modeling.

Good Evening, 

Does anyone know?  I have a Blue Box Athearn F-7  and an Atlas FP-7 and there is a difference in length between the two.  as near as I can tell, the FP-7 is longer than the F-7 by about 4 feet.  When I looked at the two alongside I was somewhat surprised to see the difference.  Is this correct for the Prototypes?  The F-7 was originally an Athearn Northern Pacific model and the Atlas was an FP-7 painted for the Butter Knife/Pine tree color scheme for the N.P.  Would the difference be due to a steam unit in the FP-7?