Category: Editorial
My Z Scale New Year’s Resolutions
Well it’s that time of year again, December 31, a great day to look back over the past year and look forward to the next. It’s also a time for many of us to make promises, deals and plans with and for ourselves. Many people find it easy to dismiss New Year’s resolutions as a [...]
New Z Scale Forum?
I’ve been in both a reflective as well as a looking-forward mood the past week or so regarding things that pertain to Z scale, the overall community and my own Ztrains.com. Earlier this year I moved my site to this new software platform and overall I think it’s has been a solid success. Bit of [...]
Good Economy For Z Scale?
With the recent opening of our own Ztrains Store, I’ve been thinking a lot about how the business of Z scale is now doing in the current economy. While I don’t know the numbers of the larger Z scale players like AZL or MTL, in many ways I’d think the business of hobbies should do [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
A Quick Diorama
I don’t know why I always do this, I begin what I think will be a quick little project and before I know it, it’s not! This time out I wanted to build a very simple and fairly generic scene on which I would shoot some photos of the Z-Panzer K5 rail gun for an [...]
Point-And-Shoot Finale
When last we wrote of our camera for Z scale saga I had just purchased a used Nikon 8800 bridge camera and was waiting on its arrival. The Nikon 8800 was built to be a bit more than a standard point-and-shoot but short of a DSLR, a bridge between the two. The 8800 arrived and [...]
Z-Panzer Eyeing North America?
I received an email earlier today from Andy Hart of Z-Panzer, a company based in England producing WWII military models in Z scale. I own several of Z-Panzer’s models including their BP42, Panzerzug armored train set; it’s an amazing thing to see on the desk in front of me. I also have Andy’s recent model [...]
