 On the March, 2024, What's Neat? We visit the end of the line model railroad club in Chicago land. What an amazing, very, very large layout this is. 80 car trains is the norm, and it's absolutely so well built. The What's Neat show is sponsored by Lombard Hobbies, your value hobby shop for over 40 years of modelers helping modelers. Big inventory, value pricing, fast shipping, and great service. And by Broadway Limited Imports, the cutting-edge leader in model trains. Check out their website at Broadway-limited.com. And by Bachman Trains. Now that's the way to run a railroad. Check out their website at BachmanTrains.com. And thank you for helping us support the best hobby in the world. This is What's Neat for March, 2024. I'm your host Ken Patterson. And this month, we've got a really good show in that George Bugatuck stop, spy, and shares with us a very simple and quick way to paint backdrops. It's really fun and easy to watch him do this project this month for What's Neat. Also in the video, Tyler Haney from Bachman Industry stops by and shares with us a lot of the new products coming out here for the month of March. Also, we visit the end of the line model railroad club in Chicago land. What an amazing, very, very large layout this is. 80 car trains is the norm, and it's absolutely so well built. So enjoy this layout tour of this magnificent layout. Also, I want to say that Broadway Limited Imports has asked me to talk about something that they've got that they're coming out with called the Conductor's Club. This is a membership exclusive deal with incredible benefits, securing a highly detailed model reserved just for you. Some of the benefits of this Conductor's Club include exclusive HO scale and in-scale locomotive offerings, be the first to know about upcoming projects and technology, a quarterly newsletter in-depth details of upcoming projects, and additional 10% discount at the Broadway Limited Imports Outlet Store online. Members only merchandise, giveaway items, and artwork, plus an additional one-year warranty on all your locomotives purchased after 2024. Check it out. They have member only gatherings with the Broadway Limited staff and a lot of other wonderful benefits you can check out at the Broadway Limited website. It sounds kind of fun, and that's something they wanted me to bring up this month as a fun addition to what they're doing for the hobby. And so with that, be sure to check out the What's Neat This Week video podcast that we shoot down here every Saturday night, keeping you updated on what's new in the hobby with special guests, our wonderful podcast crew. A lot of great conversation. It's just a fun show to produce and to watch. So check it out, What's Neat This Week. And with that, let's continue on with the rest of this, March 2024, What's Neat. For this segment of What's Neat, we're at the end of the line Monterey Road Club in Villa Park, Illinois. And what an amazingly large layout this is. First of all, I've got you, John. John, introduce yourself. My name's John Propellica. And? Mike Wassalowski. Guys, this is an amazing layout. How many years old is this beautiful layout? We started in the March of 2009. So we're 14 years. OK. And you guys are both members. How many members do you have in the script? About 13 or 14 right now. And we are looking at adding one or two more. They're already in line. So probably about 15 members when we're done. This is quite an amazing undertaking. About how many square feet do you have here? The layout is from that wall to the back wall is 80 foot. And we're about 30 foot. So it's about 80 by 30. So it's about. Yeah. That's pretty close. And this layout looks like it's designed to run long trains. Would you agree? Yes. Yes. This is designed to run anywhere from 60 to 80 car trains. We've already had 105 and 110. And the other team that set one up, they did 220 cars on this layout at once with about eight engines. It's amazing. Tell us what kind of track do you all use on this? This is Atlas, code 83. And we use Pico number eight switches on the main line. And our sightings are Atlas super sixes. That's very good. And you've designed this layout where it's definitely a walk around layout with balances and backdrops that are painted and a ton of beautiful buildings. What is the layout height? It's about 52 inches. At the max. At the max. It does go up a little bit when we get to the coal mine over there. But usually 52 inches is pretty much the standard. Is there a favorite part of the layout guys that you guys like? I like the coal mine. The coal mine? Yeah. OK. And that's a long stretch back there. That is a long stretch. And that is the tightest curve radius on the layout, which is 36 inches. Everything from there expands its way out. Yeah. Most of our curves are about 48. We've got one that's about 85. We're nowhere near powered. See, now you talked about running on the layout. When we started building this layout, we went beyond the norm. And MRA gives you a certain standard 12 gauge wire into the layout. Nope. We went with 10 gauge wire under the layout. Number 16 wire for the drops. Every three piece of flex track we put down has a drop to the 10 gauge wire. And every switch. Every electrical panel we have down there, we have circuit breakers on them for support of the layout. So you could go up and whack, boom. It just shuts the circuit breaker down, push. Everything will run around it. And then to remove the short, it takes right off and goes. That's amazing. What type of system do you use to power this layout? NCE. OK. Got the cab in the club room. And there are six boosters on the main line. There's one booster for the passenger area behind you there and the club room. And then we have two of the real old boosters that are sitting on the branch line along the wall that we're still working on right now. So nine little separate support districts that we run on this layout. Wow. Now you said this layout is designed for long trains, but do you also operate on this layout? We haven't really started any prototype operations yet, but we're looking to do that in the future. And it's a double track main, but it's set up so if we wanted to run a single track, we could take one main out of service. Because we've got enough crossovers strategically placed around the layout. So have you guys measured how many feet of track are on this? Do you have an idea? The main is just a smidge less than 10 scale miles for each main. Wow. And what's the branch line about three? The branch line is about three scale miles of track that we have that'll go along the wall. And we're going to have sightings in another yard and a steel mill, an oil refinery area. They're talking about container area over here to the back of us. We're talking about auto racks that are going to be over there with ship unloading, the pie in the sky dreams. This is amazing. Now, I think, John, you said that you guys meet on Sundays because you guys are in a shopping center and you've got to coexist with other tenants and deliveries. Correct. Yeah, like I said, it's tight on weekdays here, but we can do it as long as we make sure we're out of the way of the trucks coming in and out of the alley for deliveries. This would be amazing layout to have on tour. I guess you do that also up here in Chicago land, right? Well, we haven't really done a lot of that, except for like this small groups from other clubs or something because it's difficult to do it if you saw our parking situation here. It's difficult to have an open house like Elmhurst does because they're right in town there. The big problem here is the access. So 10 miles of track, NCE to operate it. You're thinking about doing operations. Here's a question that you never see in the magazines. If you were to redesign it, is there something now that you've done this that you guys might do different? I don't think so. I think we're pretty happy with it. Turned out? I think on the running, it has turned out to be exceptional because we can turn around and just let the train go and go and sit in the club room and watch videos. That's perfectly fine. We've had guests here and we'd go in the club room wall and we'd have two trains running out here. I said, don't you worry about it? No, don't worry about it. And then he said, one of our members said, watch this. He put his train in reverse and he went backwards around the whole layout. OK, that's a testament to good track work. We had one of our early members who retired. He's down in Florida now. He was a stickler on that. And he actually designed the layout. He had a CAD system and all that. And he was a stickler. He had me do a section of track work here. And he came back and he didn't like it. He'd riv it up. And he'd do it again. And he was the thing. He says, if the track work isn't any good, what good is it? And we rarely have derailments. And if we do have a derailment, it's usually somebody's car is out of gauge or his coupler pin struck a frog on the switch or something. Right. But like I said, we can set up a train, let it run, and sit in the club room for two hours. And Jabber John and the trains just keep going around. Gentlemen, this is absolutely beautiful. Is there anything else in closing that you might want to say to the viewers of What's Neat out there? Well, What's Neat? That's it. All right. And so guys, with that, this is an amazing model railroad club, just fantastic work, overwhelming in size. And that is this segment for What's Neat. Hey guys, George here. And in this section of What's Neat, I'm going to show you today how to make some believable backdrops without spending a whole lot of money or a whole lot of time hand painting every single little tree. Now doing this is really simple. Now first, I've painted my backdrop. Now the backdrop can be whatever color blue that you want to make. In this particular case, I went to the Home Depot, got a cheap bucket of paint, and just found this color sky that I liked. Now you can go to the Home Depot, go through there. And what I'll show you is my color coding right here so that that way, if you wanted to mix this particular color, you can do that as well. You just take that little barcode to the Home Depot, you tell them to make up a cheap gallon of paint. And I want to say it was about $16 to $20 for a gallon and just roll this out and paint just like you would any normal wall. Now, we're going to add the hills. Now if you guys have seen some scenes on my layout, you've actually seen some rolling hills in the background. Kind of nondescript hills, but not really focused enough to look like a hand-painted masterpiece like we've seen in a lot of layouts. But this is a way to get a backdrop up and going that gives the feeling of a finished scene without spending a whole lot of time or money. Now first, what we want to do is we want to take some blue masking tape, and we want to mask around where we don't want paint. Now off to the side over here, you can see I've already got some of the backdrop done. So I didn't mask off at the very end because I want to match the edges over the end there. So when I put the hills on, we're going to match it up to what is already there. Now the other thing you want to do is you'll just want to get some cheap cans of spray paint. This can be at your local hardware store or the Home Depot or whatever. This is a midnight blue, just a dark for the distant hills. And then I've got two shades of green. I've got a hunter green here and apparently they're both hunt club green, but they look different when shooting. And then white, just get a white. And what we're going to do is we're going to use that to dust over the hills to create the essence of a distance. Now of course you're asking now, how are we going to get those hills? Now thanks to a company called New London Industries, they make these poster board cut out pieces called the hills. And that's just a piece of poster board that has some laser cut hills on here in various different shapes. Now there's actually four different sizes and shapes to each one. And as you can see, the distance will give you different shapes. Now as we get closer to the front, now you're getting a more refined edge here. And this is where we'll start doing the green, simulating the forest and the trees behind. And then the last one that is really up close actually has some really nice cuts to simulate tree line and so forth. So this is going to be our closest hill. So what we want to do is we want to kind of line these up in such a way that we can make them work the way we want to. So in this case, we're going to use this distant hill first and then we're going to come back and use this guy. So to do this is really easy. So first we're going to start with our dark blue. Take the can off, set that aside. Now of course you want to shake this up. And this is really, really easy. So I'm going to bring the camera in a little bit different angle here to kind of show you what I'm doing so you can see. And let's move the cans of paint out of the way. Okay, so this is going to be really easy. So what we're going to do is we're literally just going to lay this over here and we're going to kind of match it up to the edge where we want to put that over. So we're going to take our spray can and we're just going to just kind of use this as a hard line and it creates that. And don't worry too much if you get some overspray. And then we can just move this along. And we can create whatever type of hills you want to create. And so you can kind of see now that I've created kind of some distant hills. Now we'll come in here, fill in this below. And you can kind of see how we've got a nice illusion there of distant hills. Now the next thing we're going to do, and this is where the essence of distance comes into play, we're going to take our white spray can and we're just going to spray over top of it just a little bit just to kind of give it the illusion that there's some distance there. And don't worry about being accurate. It doesn't need to be perfect. Remember it's just there to give the illusion that the scene is finished, but not so much that you have a custom painted backdrop. Then we can come in here with a different level and you kind of see where you're at in here. And then you just do the same thing. And then we kind of create. And don't worry about being perfect because you're going to have to, you're going to go over this with several coats of paint. But you can kind of see here how this new level kind of gives it some new effect. Now you can see how the one we did previously now looks like it's got a little bit of distance to it. Now you can do the few layers of this if you like. Personally, I like to do just a couple. And then if you want to come in and do like a little dusting, you can do a little dusting just enough. Now we're going to do, we'll reuse our next, which is the hills, the green. This is going to create our green over here. So then again, we look at our line over there and figure out where it was. Now remember, we don't have to be perfect. We can even go over what we just did. And we can create, again, don't worry too much. And in this case, we're actually going to go up above where we just did. Now you can see as we're building the layers on this. Now the next one we're going to come in with our darker green. If I can get this cap off, there we go. Now we're going to use the really fine, giving it a tree line. And again, we can just kind of overlap a little bit. Doesn't matter, doesn't, whoops. Doesn't need to be perfect. And now we want to finish off the scene and finish off the painting. You can kind of see how you're getting a little bit of a tree line now. And you can do a few layers of this. And again, doesn't have to be perfect. It's not necessarily a work of art. It's just there to give the implication or the impression that the scene is finished, but not so much so that it's completely done. Now I'm going to go ahead, I'm going to do another layer here with the lighter green here, because I want to hide this little bit of blue that came up here. So we're going to go ahead and just come back in. Remember, doesn't have to be perfect. And there you go. Nice, quick, easy backdrop that you can do really easily and inexpensively. Now I haven't bought these templates. As you can see, they've been used multiple times. These particular templates actually predate my tenured soundtracks. So I've had these actually for, I'd say probably 15, 20 years, but I didn't look them up the other day and they are available. So check your pricing with your local retailer and order a set of these and try this out. Like you can see, we've got a decent backdrop right here. And then so when we look at our scenes of our layout, you can actually see how putting that backdrop on just gives the implication that there's a scene, but not so much that it draws your eye away from what's in front of you. Now the other part of this, again, we can do clouds. Now this company New London Industries has a template for clouds. So now what we're gonna do is we're gonna take our white, let's move these cans around here. Okay, now you're gonna see we have the product here called the clouds. And again, this is really quick and easy and this will give us some feeling that there's some clouds up here. So again, we just do some light dusting right up against template. Doesn't need to be perfect. Then we're just showing the implication that there is something up here. Doesn't need to be perfect and different densities kind of gives the illusion that there is some clouds here. Now we have different versions of the clouds. So again, you can come in here and pick different ones and you can do top and bottom too. Doesn't matter. And again, we're just trying to create the illusion that there's some clouds in the horizon here. So come up here and again, it doesn't need to be perfect just enough to give the illusion. Now with a finished scene like this, you saw how quick that was. It was very quick, it was very easy, simple to do, inexpensive and gives you a nice looking backdrop to help finish the scene that's affordable, easy. Anybody can do this and helps give the layout a finished look. So I hope you give this a try and hope this was helpful and we'll see you next time. For this segment of What's Neat, I've got Tyler Haney from Bachman Industries in beautiful Philadelphia, Pennsylvania with us on Skype today to talk to us about a lot of the new products this spring. How are you, Tyler? It's good to have you on the show. Thanks again for doing well. It's good to be back on the show and today we're gonna be talking about some of the new product announcements in our 2024 catalog, which has just recently released. And before I get into that, the Bachman catalog release is always an exciting time because we get to show off the cover we've come up with for this catalog. Now for the folks watching at home, by the time this airs, you have probably already seen the cover but this is the first time Ken's going to see it. So I'm gonna show it off and it features none other than our brand new H.O. Sella II. Nice, look at that. Yeah, really nice photo shot by our own Matt Stern on Andy Rubo's Northeast Corridor Layout. We're really happy with how it turned out and showing the Sella II operating in the same territory that it does in real life. So without further ado, talk about some of the new product announcements. We have two new ready to run train sets in this catalog. A lot of the folks watching, what's the probably already experienced hobbyists, but for those of you who are just looking to get started in the hobby or want to introduce someone in the hobby, Bachman's all about our ready to run train sets with easy track and we've got two new ones. First one I've got all the way over here. We've had a licensing relationship with Ringling Brothers Barnum and Bailey for a couple of years now and you may have heard that the Ringling Brothers Circus relaunched and went back on the road last year with all new performances. So we're continuing our partnership with Ringling with the Circus Spectacular set. Now I'm going to show this off real quick. Doug Blaine next time he's on the show, we'll be talking about this in further detail. But you can see it features the brand new Ringling logo and branding. We've got this really beautiful F7 locomotive. We've got these two freight cars, a plug door box car and a flat car shipping containers containing all sorts of props and supplies for the Ringling Brothers Circus. Sure. And we've got of course the boosts making up the rear of the train. That's fun. It is, yeah. So Doug will be able to talk more about that in detail. I collaborated with him on the design for the paint scheme of those components of the set. And it was a really fun project. It's a fun change of pace. There you go. Yeah. And then our other new set is in 0 and 30. We know there's a very passionate, 0 and 30 modeling scene out there. So I can grab it with that. There we go. This is our second East Broad Top set, capitalizing on the return of the East Broad Top narrow gauge operation in Pennsylvania back to scenic operation. Nice, yes. And this set is called the Rock Hill Limited. And the first East Broad Top set we did a few years ago was a freight train. And now we have a passenger train to complement it. We've got this 260 locomotive, number nine, the Blacklog, which was an authentic East Broad Top locomotive. It no longer exists, unfortunately, but it was a real locomotive. So we're shining a light on part of the East Broad Top's past with that. And then, of course, we have two passenger cars, two passenger cars right here, a coach and a combine. These are actually based on two of the brand new built passenger cars that the East Broad Top took delivery of in 2021 and 2022. I believe it, I might be wrong on the dates on that, but they're brand new cars. They were completely new from the ground up. And this is our representation of that. So it's kind of melding the past and the future of the East Broad Top. And we think that's going to be pretty popular. You are right. Boy, that ON-30 stuff, it's just taken, when it originally came out, it just took the world by storm. And I do recall that narrow gauge Gazette became about 30% thicker overall because of that one line of scale. Absolutely. And of course, we owe that all to the late Lee Riley, who was such a champion of ON-30. Yes, God bless him, yes. Yes, it makes me smile. So we're happy to be continuing Lee's legacy there with ON-30. So moving on now into eight-show and end-scale separate sale, this is only a small selection of the new paint schemes that we've announced in the 2024 catalog. And you can view the complete catalog online or view it at your local hobby shop. But we've already got some painted samples of some of these new items that we introduced and we wanted to show them off. So starting off in eight-show, one of the new paintings we have, this is our eight-show SD40-2 DCC Sound Value onboard. And we're doing this something a little bit differently. This is the Milwaukee Road Bicentennial Special Paint Scheme back in 1976, the 200th anniversary of the United States of America with the Declaration of Independence. And with the 250th anniversary coming up, we wanted to bring some more patriotic items into the line. So I think this is a very cool paint scheme. It's very different from the typical Milwaukee Road, orange and black. I think it's just a really beautiful scheme. I'm really happy with how these red, white and blue curved stripes look going across the side of the locomotive and the America's Bicentennial Light lettering proudly on the side. No, you did a good job on that one for sure. Yeah, thanks. Me and our factory, our engineering team, they always do a really good job of translating the prototype images and our artwork into a really detailed, accurate model. There you go. Yeah. Now moving into rolling stock in HO scale, one of the big announcements we have in this catalog is that we've been hearing requests for a long time. Typically when we were to introduce a new freight car or passenger car, it would be a variety of road names, but with only one road number for each road name. But now we're kind of changing things up and for a couple of our freight cars in this catalog, we're introducing two road numbers to make it easier to build up a train if you have a favorite river that you want to have more than one car out for a particular car type and road name. Now you can do that. And as an example of that, here's our Bethlehem Steel 100 ton three bay hopper. This is a new paint scheme for us as well, the CSX with the large CSX logo there and the little ease up handle with care decals on either end of the car. As you can see, two distinct road numbers. Yes. So you can, now you can start building up your unit trains with Bachman cars. So all of our existing 100 ton hopper road names will also be getting a second road number. We're adding second road numbers for two of the cars we announced last year, the Trinity 5161 covered hopper and the AirSlide covered hopper. So, giving the model is what they've been asking for. Here's a good example. This is what our 100 ton hopper spread looks like now. It has double the side. Yes, it has. Look at that. Yeah. Fantastic. Yeah. That's a lot of product to keep track of. It is, yeah. But it's all about making the consumer happy. So we were happy to do it. And as another example of two road numbers as well as some new paint schemes, we have our eight-row chemical tank car which released about a year ago now. Okay. It has been getting some good reception. So we've got two road names, two new road names with two road numbers each. We've got the Allied Chemical Agricultural Division for Arcadian Fertilizer. I think it's a very distinct car, you know, in almost all, you know, light gray with the red logos. And you can see they have the large dome style. We do large domes and small domes on these cars for pressurized and non-pressurized cars. And here's our example of the small dome cars that we're adding for Hampshire Chemical. I believe these are, it's actually written right there, hydrocyanic acid. Nice. So two road numbers for these. Pretty cool looking with the red stripes going both around the sides and the top of the tank. So I think they'll look pretty cool, you know, rolling down people's layouts. No, I agree. I agree, it looks fantastic. Small dome and large dome. Yeah, exactly. So that's, again, that's just a small selection of some of the new HO-ends we have in the catalog. You can find them all online or at your local hobby shop in a print copy. We've got some unscale new items as well. Got a couple of new paint schemes for our GP40. We're gonna start it off here with the analog version that runs on regular DC power, two new road names for this. Okay. Baltimore and Ohio, 1960s paint scheme, basically all dark blue with the yellow cell stripe, I think is a very distinctive looking and cool looking paint scheme. Glue all the way down from the fuel tank in the trucks. And then we also have Canadian National. This is the non-dynamic brake version that we've introduced a few years ago. This one is sub-lettered for the Grand Trunk Western. So this is post the Canadian National fully taking over the Grand Trunk Western, you know, bringing it into their branding. So a more modern paint scheme. And you know, something a little bit different, you know, from the typical just straight up Canadian National. So that's two new paint schemes for the analog version. And then we also have a new in DCC sound value. We have the very popular CSX brake future. Okay, that's nice. Yes. With our sound value and skill locomotives that has soundtracks economy on board. So moving now into rolling stock. These are not exactly a new announcements. We showed them in our NMRA announcements last year, but we now have painted samples that I wanted to show off today of our end scale coil car. Got two different hood options. These show the angled hood option, which was a bit of an earlier design for the Norfolk and Western and Conrail. I think these are very, you know, very nicely done, well detailed cars for end scale. Yes. Coil hoods are removable. You can stack them on top of each other in your rail yard like so. You can run them without the hoods. You can mix and match like you'll often see, you know, on railroads as the hoods would get separated from the cars they originally belonged to. Right, yes. Yeah, and then here's our round hood version with some more modern paint schemes, the BNSF and CSX. And for those of you who don't know or don't or miss the announcements, the best thing about these cars is that they have six removable coil loads included, as you can see here. That's cool, yes. Yeah, they come right out of the car. You can see the, you know, the healthy, the sheets of steel are coiled up and rolled up for transport. So it's a very cool car with a lot of detail, a lot of, you know, fun features for customization and those will be out later this year. That is very cool. The catalog cover looks good, the ON30 and the train sets look good. The two types of hoods for the coil cars, the freight cars now with two different numbers on them. A lot of neat things are going on out there with you guys, Tyler. Yeah, thank you, Ken. I do have one more quick announcement, real quick and end scale. Our smooth side passenger cars, which we've had for a while, we've got a new road name for those and all the car types we offer. Nice. This is the Pennsylvania fleet of modernism scheme to match the streamlined Pennsylvania K-4 Pacific that we brought out a couple of years ago. So you can see, you know, it's a very distinctive, you know, very beautiful, hard-to-peen scheme with all the pinstripes and the two-tone brown. We've got the baggage car. We've got our coach car, 85-foot coach with three road numbers. So you can get a nice, consist, built up right away. Yes, that's going to be really nice. That's going to be really beautiful. Yeah, and finally, the observation car bringing up the rear. This one's called the Metropolitan View. Fantastic. For those of you who got a streamlined K-4 when they came out and had been waiting for the matching passenger cars, they're here and they're on their way. That's absolutely fantastic. So that rounds out what we have for March, correct? That's all we have. There's plenty more, you know, that has already, you know, we've already gotten samples of it boxed in. I'd love to show it all, but you know, it's, there's only so many hours in the day and we'll be showing off more, you know, in the coming months here on What's Neat. No, that's really, really cool. I am so excited about all the Amtrak stuff that is coming out because that is something that I enjoy watching run down here on this layout. Well, Tyler, I want to thank you so much for participating with the viewers of What's Neat. We love it every month when you come in and that catalog looks good, doesn't it? Yes, it does. Yeah, thank you, Ken. It's always a pleasure. All right, and so with that, that is this segment for the March, What's Neat. All of the products seen on this episode of What's Neat are available from Lombard Hobbies in Lombard, Illinois, or order online at LombardHobby.com. And by Broadway Limited Imports, the cutting edge leader in model trains. Check out their website at Broadway-limited.com. Bachman Trains. Now that's the way to run a railroad. Check out their website at BachmanTrains.com.