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Kraft Trains the tricks & secrets of building your own model train sets
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Woodland Scenics is the world leader in realistic model scenery for model railroads, architectural layouts, displays, dioramas, gaming, military models, miniatures and more. For over 60 years, Atlas has been a leader in the world of model railroading. Atlas has its roots in model railroad track and accessory making through invention, innovation and ingenuity. Atlas has a proud reputation as a family-owned business and is well-known for quality and excellence. Between Atlas and our sister company, Atlas O, we currently manufacture track, locomotives, rolling stock and structures in N, HO, O and O-27 scales. No matter your scale, you'll find the products you need and that "You're on the Right Track With Atlas. Bachmann Trains is now known for its extensive and award-winning line of model railroading products, but the company started in 1833 as a producer of handcrafted ivory accessories, beginning a 180-year commitment to quality that continues to this day.
Pritchard Patent Product Co. Ltd (PECO) has always been a forward-looking family company with a long tradition of innovative thinking. The business started trading in 1946 and is now in its third generation. Although the history of the company is of considerable interest, the present management do not dwell over the past but use the knowledge as important inspiration for the development of the future. When Lionel founder Joshua Lionel Cowen's immigrant family arrived in New York after the Civil War, the railroads were literally America's engines of progress. The "Golden Spike" meeting of the Union Pacific and Central Pacific lines in 1869 unified the continent and signaled the birth of a world power. Cowen was born in 1877, just before Edison's first electric light. He grew up with real trains, amid dizzying change. Around the time he founded Lionel in 1900, passenger lines like the peerless Twentieth Century Limited symbolized American technology and sophistication.

Cowen was already a successful inventor when he created his first toy train. But The Electric Express and its offspring soon became a sacred mission, and Cowen would spend a lifetime stoking America's imagination with the romance of the rails. He told boys that Lionels would prepare them for adulthood. Soon Dads too were encouraged to join Youngsters in model train enthusiasm, to future father-son bonding. With growing prosperity, Lionel's layouts cropped up in more living rooms, especially at Christmas. Before mid-century, railroads were our economic lifeblood, as well as cultural icons -- but it was not to last.

And when Americans started driving to suburbia and flying cross-country, they stopped buying Lionel trains. By the 1960s, freight lines were being scrapped, and fathers and sons were on opposite sides of the "generation gap." That decade saw the tragic demise of New York's Pennsylvania Station, the retirement of The Twentieth Century Limited, and the passing of Joshua Lionel Cowen.

But now the Lionel dream is back and better than ever. As Lionel looks to the future, it strives to ignite the imaginations and hearts of today’s children and adults through continued success with branded and licensed products, an increased presence in the digital space and recapturing its rightful place “under the tree.” Through partnerships with evergreen brands such as NASCAR, Warner Bros., Crayola, Coca-Cola, John Deere and many others, Lionel has lined itself up for guaranteed success for many years to come. With innovative products such as the LCS®, iCab, Battle Trains, Lionel Tracks and a revamped, more user-friendly Lionel.com, the 115-year-old company has made sure it stays on the cutting-edge of technology. The Lionel name has always been synonymous with Christmas and a train set under every Christmas tree, and now more than ever the company’s ensuring that they are a major player in any holiday plans. For Lionel, the future is indeed bright.
Kato USA was established in 1986, with the first U.S. locomotive model (the GP38-2, in N-Scale) released in 1987. Since that time, Kato has come to be known as one of the leading manufacturers of precision railroad products for the modeling community. Kato's parent company, Sekisui Kinzoku Co., Ltd., is headquartered in Tokyo, Japan.

In addition to producing ready-to-run HO and N scale models that are universally hailed for their high level of detail, craftsmanship and operation, Kato also manufactures UNITRACK, the finest rail & roadbed modular track system available to modelers today. With the track and roadbed integrated into a single piece, UNITRACK features a nickel-silver rail and a realistic-looking roadbed. Patented UNIJOINERS allow sections to be snapped together quickly and securely, time after time if necessary.

The Kato USA office and warehouse facility is located in Schaumburg, Illinois, approximately 30 miles northwest of Chicago. All research & development of new North American products is performed here, in addition to the sales and distribution of merchandise to a vast network of wholesale representatives and retail dealers. Models requiring service sent in by hobbyists are usually attended to at this location as well. The manufacturing of all Kato products is performed in Japan.
Supporters of KATO should note that there is currently no showroom or operating exhibit of models at the Schaumburg facility. Furthermore, model parts are the only merchandise sold directly to consumers.
Model trains are a beautiful hobby that brings generations together. It has been a special pleasure for FLEISCHMANN to light up countless children's eyes for nearly 125 years now and to fascinate adults with enormous attention to delicate detailing and precise technology.
The FLEISCHMANN locomotives and wagons combine technical sophistication with detailed depiction and high creativity. This perfect match of rich detailing and technology, which the FLEISCHMANN product developers constantly optimize and develop, is our secret and guarantees for the continued success of the FLEISCHMANN miniature railways.

From tin toys to the model railway
As early as 1887, Jean Fleischmann founded a company that in the following decade started the production of a large variety of tin toys, such as ships, aircrafts and magnetic swimming animals. In 1910, the company even participated in the World's Fair in Brussels. The high quality of the toys at that time is underlined by the awarding of a gold medal.
In 1949, FLEISCHMANN was the first European manufacturer to launch a two-wire direct current model railway in Gauge 0. Three years later, the first Gauge H0 product line was launched, and is still market-leader.
A milestone for the future of the model railway is the state-of-the-art Z21 control center, which for the first time combines the virtual and real game worlds and takes the play value of the models to a whole new level.
The FLEISCHMANN headquarter is located in Heilsbronn, near Nuremberg, in central Franconia. The company has a global presence and is part of the Modelleisenbahn München GmbH, a company of the Modelleisenbahn Holding GmbH, to which also belongs the Austrian manufacturer Roco.

FLEISCHMANN sets the highest quality standards
For FLEISCHMANN, quality production plays a key role in the company. Strong values and manual work occupy important positions in the company. Only in this way can the delicately detailed, extremely reliable and outstanding functional miniature models be designed. The comprehensive FLEISCHMANN quality management with internally and externally applied quality assurance measures is constantly concerned that FLEISCHMANN locomotive and wagon owners receive the best possible quality and enjoy their models for a long time. So in this field FLEISCHMANN also is a pioneer in the model railway industry. For example, the FLEISCHMANN plant in Arad was the first factory in the model railway industry to be certified by the German DQS GmbH according to ISO 9001. Wm. K. Walthers, Inc., was founded in Milwaukee in 1932 — but it really started on Christmas Day in 1899 when seven-year-old Bill Walthers found his first wind-up toy train waiting under the tree! Milwaukee was a hotbed of railroading and technology in the early years of the 20th century, and Bill made the switch to electric trains over the years. His standard-gauge attic layout became a test-bed for his ideas and inventions to improve operation, which he shared through how-to articles in early hobby magazines.

As letters arrived asking for advice, Bill self-published what may have been the hobby’s first how-to book, the Signal and Control Manual for Model Railroaders. But as hobby shops were unheard of, many folks were unable to purchase supplies locally and began writing to see if they could buy directly from Bill. The idea of turning his hobby into a business began to take shape, leading to the very first Walthers ad in the in the May 1932 issue of The Model Maker (forerunner of today’s Railroad Model Craftsman). Offering a 24-page catalog for 15¢ listing rail, couplers and electrical supplies, sales were over $500.00 for the first year, and the fledgling company was off to a strong start.

Sales boomed during those Depression years as folks sought low-cost ways to have fun at home. By 1937, operations had to move from the family home to larger quarters in the Erie Terminal Building, where all of the O Scale milled-wood parts, metal castings, decals and more were made and packaged in-house. Production soon ramped up with the introduction of the first HO Scale models, which were also featured in their own catalog that year.

The 1939 New York World’s Fair introduced thousands of people to the hobby through the biggest operating O Scale layout built to that time, which featured cars and locos supplied by Walthers. Success was soon overshadowed as WWII brought a halt to most model production. Walthers soldiered on making decals and what little else it could from non-essential materials. By 1943, they were scraping the bottom of the barrel - literally - in a series of famous ads explaining the difficulties obtaining supplies for the duration.

While the postwar years were filled with promise, smaller homes and growing families left little room for O Scale railroads, and HO quickly gained in popularity. In 1958, Bill retired and his son Bruce took over, and just as full-size railroads were hard-hit by new technology, so too were model railroads. Leisure time was spent with TV sets, not train sets and many distributors simply abandoned the hobby business. Walthers took a different track, becoming a full-line distributor of other manufacturers’ products in 1960 while continuing to develop its HO and O Scale lines.

In 1972, Bruce’s son Phil joined the company as Wholesale Division President, becoming President in 1984 when Bruce retired. Under Phil’s guidance, Walthers began an unprecedented program of expansion that would eventually include HO plastic freight cars, Code 83 Track and Cornerstone structure kits. With hobbyists embracing home computers and the Internet as modeling tools, Phil’s own interest in the new technology played a key part in the design and development of walthers.com, which was launched in 1994.

During much of this time Stacey Walthers-Naffah, oldest of Phil’s four children, often came in on Saturdays to help her father and grandfather. In later years, she worked in the Distribution Center and spent one summer as an intern in the Publications Department. Following college and a career in marketing and advertising, Stacey officially became the fourth generation of the Walthers family to join the business in 2009. Over the years, she held the positions of Consumer Marketing Manager, Vice President of Marketing Communications and Vice President of Sales and Marketing, becoming President in 2018 following Phil’s retirement.

Walthers is on track for the future, dedicated to helping you find the information, supplies and equipment you need to make your model railroading fun, just as we’ve been since 1932. Be sure to visit walthers.com, and check out our monthly Walthers Flyer (available online and at participating dealers) and annual Model Railroad Reference Book for the latest Walthers products, as well thousands more items from our many suppliers.
Model Prices is the world's biggest index of hobby model products and prices. On my site (yes, Model Prices is a solo project), I currently index 215,404 different models from 1,879 shops from all over the world.

My site started out focusing on model trains only. I have recently added slot cars and just started added diecast models too.

I add new products every week and all the prices, stock levels, etc. are updated several times each week.
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The O Scale Resource - July August 2019 Page:72 Article By Jim Kellow. At KraftTrains.com our goal is to provide free information to all model railroaders about model trains and the hobby. Learn how to build your own model railway and enjoy your model railroad for many years to come. Build your own building and structures from scratch with printable PDF templates files for your model train set. Make your own model trees for your model train set layout. Make lakes & rivers for a well detailed model railroad. Making hills & Mountains for a great landscape. Laying out grass & bushes for a vibrant look. Building model train set layout tables designs for a sturdy & well built table designs and more.  
Kraft Trains the tricks & secrets of building your own model train set Kraft Trains the tricks & secrets of building your own model train set Kraft Trains the tricks & secrets of building your own model train set Kraft Trains the tricks & secrets of building your own model train set Go Instagram today to see what is new at KraftTrains.com. See more railroading clubs, more train models, see random railroad pitchers, and a lot more. So sit back and enjoy your model railroading experience.

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