Tag: featured
Occupy Z Scale (aka The Coffee Party)
I like revolutions, not full blown let’s burn the thing to the ground revolutions, but smaller and more focused ones. Pretty much everyone in the US, and likely worldwide, has heard of the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street movements. Without getting into the politics or the specifics of either group, what I find appealing […]
Stress Free Z
Here at Ztrains we’ve recently; last night actually, reopened our own Ztrains Store. As with many things in model railroading, schedules and deadlines are sometimes more… flexible than we plan. Personally, I lean on the old chestnut: It’s not how you start, it’s how you finish that counts. Plans and schedules are great things to […]
Waterfront Project | Part 10
In our last Waterfront Project installment I mentioned the dock we were building would also be home to our next kit and here it is, the Micro-Trains Line, Canning Plant Kit (MTL Part 799 90 931). Continuing along with trying to keep some of these kits looking utilitarian and down to earth, I went again […]
Waterfront Project | Part 9
Today’s MTL Waterfront Project kit is the Pier & Building Kit. At 8″ long by 2″ wide, it’s a large piece. The size of the dock will provide a home for our next kit… but we’ll get to that kit in our next article. The building portion of this model is built on a separate […]
Waterfront Project | Part 8
Here’s our version of the Micro-Trains Line, Pier Warehouse Kit. As with our last build, the Hotel Kit, this one has lots of interesting angles and is also surprisingly easy to assemble. On these kits I find myself more and more playing with slight color variations and subtle weathering ideas. I don’t want to go […]
Waterfront Project | Part 7
Our next Micro-Trains kit build is the Hotel Kit which has some great features including a second story outdoor deck, a pair of roof dormers and lots of windows, 40 windows in total! There are only 39 windows on our version of this kit but we’ll get to that in a minute. For a building […]
Z Scale Clearance Gauges
It doesn’t come up every day but it most definitely does come up: how big should my tunnel portal be, how much height do I need under a bridge, why didn’t I think of train clearance before I built my layout? It’s really unfortunate when someone builds a scene and only then realizes they can’t […]
Z-Panzer | K5 Railgun
In these interview articles I generally ask the questions and the interviewee answers, but for this article I asked Andy Hart of Z-Panzer to talk directly to our readers and share a bit of the thought, design and production processes that went in to this magnificent Z scale model. These photos were shot in low […]
Hurricane Irene | August 2011
Here on the North Shore of Long Island, New York, things are getting back to normal after Hurricane Irene blew through this past weekend, Saturday and Sunday, August 27th and 28th. Leading up to the storm I figured the weather forecasters were exaggerating and the worst that would happen is that we’d lose power for […]
Black Poly Fiber
I liked the way the new diorama was coming along, highlighted by the Fast Tracks #8 turnout and supported with an array of soils and multiple static grass colors applied. Since I’m not using any rock castings on this scene I wanted to add something else, maybe some bushes or general scrub around the tracks […]