I see in the new MR magazine (News & Products) that ANE Model has a new SmartFrog V.4 board for powering turnout frogs.  Their website and instructions are not clear if these are similar to the popular Tam Valley Frog Juicers circuits. The picture of the new board shows multiple screw wire connections where it appears that 8 frogs could be attached.  I was wondering if anyone has tried this new product and whether it really can handle more frogs than its Tam Valley counterpart.

Lately, we've been unable to find Ming Fern to make more realistically-sized pine trees for O scale (20" tall). Our local sources (Michaels, flower mart, craft stores, etc.) completely ran out and their suppliers were out. We found some about a year ago, but that supply dried up. I don't know how the situation is for others making conifers using this technique, but we found another supplier and would like to throw as many tree-builders his way so he'll keep stocking Ming Fern. The supplier is:

JR Roses

I believe that sidings (and yards) on the prototype were often slightly lower than the main line in order to prevent cars from running away onto the main line.  I have also read that emulating this on a model layout enhances the realism and helps to make the siding track look different from the mainline (in addition to other techniques such as using lower profile rail and larger spacing between ties).

I have a couple of questions that someone out there might help answer:

As I mentioned in my Building Simple Circuits thread, putting electronics together is an underappreciated part of model railroading. This note is another in my series of attempts to spread knowledge of this surprisingly simple skill. This will show how to work with an integrated circuit and an easy technique to go from a working breadboard to a permanent module.