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Note, INSTA777 expired. Last day of use was yesterday, April 20th. Of course I dragged my feet (had other more important issues) and when I went to order just now it popped up an expiration message. 😞 It was a good one at $14 off which cuts the shipping in half. Oh well, @Lessigen please post the "Next Code" if you ever get one. With the decreasing strength of the USD, might as well wait a little. I'll also be in Japan for 4 weeks in October. Hopefully the USD will strengthen back up by then. 🤞

@Lessigen Hopefully works out for both of us. Taobao is great for other things. I use it for bulk of my keyboard stuff (the keycaps, cables, switches) and model cars stuff mainly dioramas that i can combine with the trains. Though i mostly tokyostation for cars since its comparable prices to it hk/china/japan source with 5% gst only and 100cad is free shipping. Just learning process. @disturbman Khaho is something else for sure. It’s website been down for week. Though that is good for the wallet there. There restock notices are sometimes hard to resist. My thoughts are if shipping prices continue to rise in Asia, even europe with its flat rate shipping will be better option.

Speaking of long rail, here is a piece of equipment I've never seen in person- a kiya E195 self-propelled rail carrier. Passing through Akabane Station recently with a load:

150 meter long rails arrived in Oshamambe, Hokkaido today after a 2100km journey by rail. These will be used in the Hokkaido Shinkansen construction from Shin Hakodate Hokuto to Sapporo. Formerly rails arrived in 25m sections shipped by sea, and transfered to flatbed truck. STV news report: The train passing through Totsuka, Kanagawa Prefecture on the Tokaido Line:

CM closed the TB pre-orders for their CR200J.

All timey day. The Kato C11 is an incredibly well runner.

I'll start to wonder if MA hired a new product lead. These last few months have been hitting the spot with totally overdue and unexpected re-releases. Beside the Kiha 183 'Yufuin no Mori', the 371 series and Calpico trains are quite welcome. I might get the Kiha 58 Suguin Line myself as a heritage train to go with my fleet of E130s.

@Lessigen Yes, dealing with TB is not for our simple Western minds 😄 Joking aside, that's about the process. This is how it was done for the CR400AF, the DF4D-3 and DF4D-4. Beside the language barrier, if things haven't changed, the big problem with TB is that they offer international shipping to only a limited selection of countries. Which then limit the use of TB to proxy services, who works well but don't offer many cheap international shipping options and often skimmed about 10% of the item price as hidden conversion fees. Customer support will also be extremely limited if anything is wrong with a model. That's the other big reason why J-scale set up a direct relationship with CM: we can offer full support without much language barrier (at least if you speak German, English or French). And though it might take some time due to shipping, we always get parts, replacements and guidance from Liuzhou. I believe that Jacky and CNRailModels would too, but my experience with Khaho is rather that they might not.

And here's a graduating engineering student desperately looking for jobs I made a few 3D models in Solidworks, but none had any chance making into the real world. Perhaps next time I should get a 3D printer instead of another train...

Very interesting. I'll buy 😀 I have measured the size of some of the standard Tomix and Kato catenary masts for reference. There is a lot of variety. First, Tomix 3050 (https://www.tomytec.co.jp/tomix/products/n/3050.html). The distance is 75mm. The masts sit just outside of the fence when using wide tracks. Tomix 3004 (https://www.tomytec.co.jp/tomix/products/n/3004.html) is a bit wider. 80mm. Kato 23-063 is wider, 83mm (https://www.katomodels.com/product/n/kasencyu) Tomix triple track are either 112mm or 117mm This is the manual of Tomix 3007, with a lot of useful measurements Tomix 3007.pdf Marc

China actually had a few double decker E/DMUs in the early 2000s with double deck height power cars that's even closer match: https://zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/神州號NZJ2型柴油動車組 https://zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/新曙光號NZJ1型柴油動車組 https://zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/金輪號NZJ2型柴油動車組

I'm still waiting for my A8168 which was supposed to come out during february 😢 http://www.microace-arii.co.jp/release/pdf/A8168.pdf

Speaking with an older member of the club, the standards we use come from an old KATO layout book published in the 90s. The base unit is KATO 24-011 "Module Panel 40/900" and 24-012 "Module Corner Panel 40". A full example module is the KATO 24-061 "Module Base 900A".

MicroAce announced their releases for October 2025. Of note to me in particular is the "Yufuin No Mori II" which has never been released in N scale to my knowledge. I'll now be able to complete my Yufuin no Mori collection! https://ngauge.jp/poster/ma202510/

Having the brackets separate will also free up a lot of etching space as the brackets and wire holders can be packed into a tight etch space then. Why not just make one or two cross pieces and folks can just lop them off at exactly where they want them. The connection plates will hide the last bit at the posts so doesn’t matter if not perfectly ending on a V. I realize you will know they are not ending exactly perfect under the plate, but you wont see it visually! Things can be symmetrical if folks measure out from the middle to clip off each end evenly. May save you from trying to figure out all the spacing folks may want. Same would go for the mast heights. jeff

I think it depends on the venue. This world record attempt is at the NMRA National Convention. Sure there'll be some public wondering in but it will mostly be train nerds. Now if you are going to display at a train station or a public library or some other non-train event, then maybe you don't want to put on such a large layout. Also, what's considered large or too large or small or just right? At this year's Amherst Railway show in Springfield, MA, we had two major T-Trak layouts. One was a 32' x 32' letter "E" and the other was a 65' oval. The public loved both and both were crowded to the point where it was difficult to run trains. 🤣 Certainly it did not intimidate anyone that I could see. BTW, the Saturday and Sunday attendance broke their record. 27,500+. Large (or small) doesn't mean bad. What is that famous show business saying, know your audience? 🙂

The total distance between the center of the track and the "safe space next to the track is the overhang + half the width of the railcar. NEM also says that the overhang is equal on both sides of the center. I guess there is just so much distance you can have between the bogie and the front, and in general it shouldn't be more than half the railcar's length... (Which I assume would be the only way to have a bigger overhang at the front). Making the brackets an individual part is really important. Besides the normal zigzag path a wire has on the straight track, you just can't accommodate for all possible distances the masts will have in a curve. And the distance the wire is off the center in a curve (which it always is) depends on the length of each segment...

Well if less is more then it follows that more is less so more more is less less… go figure. Im sick of being asked “Would you like to SuperSize that?!” I always bite my tongue from saying “No could you please SmallSize that for me?” I even at times order off the kids menu as it’s closer to my appetite many times. It is this obsession with big! The last couple o years I have gone back into exhibit developer mode and been watching folks and how they approach, walk around, how long they spend, and where they leave. Less than half make a complete circle of even a 2 or 3 table square/rectangle. Kids are actually the best at wanting to see it all. Adding more does not retain more. But my complete focus on doing events is not on model train folks, its on regular public and leaving a big stamp in their brains model trains are a fun hobby to think about, then that makes it all about giving an experience that plants the best seeds for that. There being big can make it seem totally unapproachable to the public. To each their own. Jeff

LOL as i was starting to read this and looking at the first illustration of the Y the same method popped into my head for it and to just glue or solder it where you want and as i scrolled down there it was in total 3D graphic glory! Nice work joe. jeff

That would be excellent to buy them pre installed and not have to ship stuff back and forth! jeff

This rather nicely brings up another part of the design I have a looking at. The position of the brackets to hold the overhead wires. A lot of the reference in formation I was sent was taken from the World Kogei brass kits. Similar to the plastic catenary the position of the insulators and the Y shaped brackets that hold the lower arms it fixed in a position. Something like this: This seems rather limiting to what you can do. With what Junech mentioned running a wider gap between tracks would put all the mounting points in the wrong place. I have drawn a couple of examples of design differences I have noticed, there are many more. For the 3 track example it is quite common to run two tracks under top mounted connections and the third with a side mounted arm (top right). For the 4 track example it seems quite common the use the longer span with less fewer tracks (bottom right) to reach over obstructions such as access roads or platforms. I am thinking about making the various connections separate so that they can be moved around to suit any track plan. Using the Y shaped support as an example I was thinking of something like this: There would be a little fold down tab at the top to help with alignment: This could then wrap around two sides of the gantry and be glued or soldered in place: This would mean more construction however I feel that it would be worth it to allow more freedom to create what you want. If you just wanted a simple representation of catenary you could even them off. Let me know if you like this as an idea or if you would prefer them to be fixed. Joe

Interesting. Good to know, I wonder how much different loading gauges would affect the amount of overhang.

The set track curves I have are 315mm radius so not a particularly tight curve. The longest body cars I have are a Class 800 IET (prototype 26m coach) and I figured I would test a Shinkansen coach as it has a different loading gauge to the oddly narrow trains in the UK. I chose a 700 Series because it's the best looking 🤭 and it has a broad front end. Side by side the wheel placement is roughly the same with 800 having a longer overhang at each end. Clearance is fine at the car ends, they barely go beyond the edge of the track. The 800 is more pronounced but even then the overhang is under 5mm. The nose of 700 sticks out by a similar amount. Clearance on the inside is more pronounced and again the 800 overhangs more. I am actually not sure the 800 would be to happy going around a much tighter radius, the longer ends do make quite a difference, the coupler was almost over the outer rail.

You won't be able to run that max-size NEM railcar in parallel on a R140/R103 double track since the overhang of both cars would be more than the distance between the tracks. So, the track with the bigger radius would need to increase to a radius that would allow the railcars to pass each other. The bigger radius curve would need to increase its radius to half the width of the railcar + the overhang. So you will end up with an R243/R103 curve with tomix track and have a total distance of 175mm. That would result in using the 4-track wide catenary... That leads me to the result that for Tomix, Kato and any other fixed track, you wouldn't need more than double the standard track-width for catenary length on a double track. If more would be needed, you would need to increase the distance between tracks to the next radius to let railcars pass each other. And if you do that, you would go with a 3-track wide catenary or even 4-track/5-track wide catenary. So Tomix would be 75mm catenary and Kato would be 70mm catenary at least from the calculations point of view. But that follows the NEM standards, which are European...

For anyone who's curious about the process of ordering from CHANGMING's Taobao storefront for the upcoming CR200J, it's a bit involved but this is how I understood it (with a bit of DeepL/Google Translate). Of course, if you want to avoid this hassle you have wonderful people like Stephan and Vincent at J-Scale (link | link) or Jacky from CNRailModel (link | link) to basically make this like any other online purchase, which is my recommendation. Khaho is another option but I have no personal experience from them yet. Anyways, I mainly did this because I already had a Taobao account set up and verified. Here are the steps: You need a Taobao account. Getting one ranges from moderately to very annoying depending on your luck with account verification as you may need anything between your phone number to your passport and support is useless for most account suspension/locking issues Go to the CR200J page and select your flavour of green: link Click "add to cart" (the lighter orange button) Go to your cart (the link with the small cart icon in the header) and select checkout (the orange button underneath the ¥200) Under 跨境段物流方式 (cross-border logistics), select 跨境段物流方式 (contact seller for overseas shipping) - if you select the other options you'll pay for overseas shipping which will not apply on a reservation, so you'll be wasting your money In the right box, select either AliPay (the top one) or Credit Card (in my case it said CAD as part of the text) depending on which one you have available Enter in your credit card details, optionally save it using the checkbox. I chose not to. There's a small fee associated with using a CC, something like 0.6% but it does convert directly into your currency After payment, CHANGMING will "ship" the reservation item to you. You have to accept this shipment for your non-refundable reservation to be locked in, it'll do so automatically after like 50 days I believe When it's time to pay for the remainder, CHANGMING will post a Taobao link on their Wechat where you can pay for it. Be sure to select the same car variant as you reserved. This time, ensure you're paying for overseas shipping (跨境段物流方式 section, select whichever one you prefer) CHANGMING will ship you the actual train and eventually, with a bit of luck, you'll receive it in a timely manner