During my visit to my club last weekend, I took a little time to look over the club's vast library of model railroad magazines. Our club is over 30 years old, and the club's library boasts nearly every model railroad magazine published in that time. Although today's model trains are far superior to those of only a few years ago, it still can be very rewarding to browse through these old magazines.

And here's a thought for long-time modelers who may have built up a sizable library of their own and now wish to reclaim the space in their home. Why not find a club that hasn't been around very long and donate your old magazines.

A consist, in the context I'm using the word today, is a set of locomotives put together to pull a long train. With DCC there is more than one way to put together a consist. The complex technical way is to give each locomotive its own address, and then create a consist address and assign the individual locomotive addresses to this consist address. The consist information is stored in your DCC command unit.

The easy way to create a DCC consist is to simply give all the locomotives in the consist the same address. This also makes things much easier if you're taking your consist to run on your club's layout; you won't have to program a consist into the club's command unit. The trade-off is, if and when you separate the locomotives to run them individually they will all respond to the same control signals if they're placed on your layout at the same time. In that case you'll need to give each of them their own individual addresses.

This past Saturday I finally got my Kato Broadway Limited set onto my club's layout. I used one of Kato's new PRR E7s to pull the consist. On the layout's other loop I put up my Kato Morning Daylight train pulled by one of the new Kato ALCO PAs. Both of these trains ran for over three hours without any derailments. This layout is about 30 years old, and has grades over four percent. I have to say that I'm really convinced these recent Kato releases represent a new state of the art in N scale model railroading.

I was looking at the back of the recent Walthers' Catalog. The featured product was the HO scale Fairbanks Morse H10-44 yard switcher. With only the one long hood, and a cab that seems to disappear if you look at it directly from the side, the H10-44 has always reminded me of a refrigerator laying on its side on wheels. But seeing it in Wabash black gave me quite another impression. This time I saw it as the monolith in 2001 a Space Odessy. Suddenly I visualized the black H10-44 rolling slowly through the yard, building trains to the strains of Also Sprach Zarathustra. Now that's an impressive diesel!