April 2022 Railfanning Northern Pacific Bridge Traffic on the SR&W

Spring River & Western Railroad Company
Pull up a chair and dive into this freelanced, HO scale bridge line built by Carl Lester. In this feature, you’ll see mostly Northern Pacific locomotives hauling manifests and coal along the route, plus some excursion trains and custom motive power owned by the SR&W. You’ll enjoy Carl’s fictional history of the railroad and its sister mining and logging companies as well as learn about the construction and operation of the layout. As always, you’ll get to see lots of full-page photographs. The feature includes a railfanning video and a map of the layout.

More Accurate Ops: Modeling Agricultural Storage
For more accurate modeling based on the prototype, learn about how farmers and co-ops use silos and grain bins and some interesting ways you can incorporate them into ops.

Build a Functional Split-Rail Derailer
Using step-by-step instructions and photographs, we show you how to convert a turnout into a functional derailer. You can do this project using a repurposed switch.

Carl Lester’s HO scale layout

Carl Lester’s HO scale layout