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Hard Off Tachikawa Nishisuna. It's a great store. I love arriving at the last store of the day like this. https://maps.app.goo.gl/9xEVJh39szgvEHsh8 I ordered a new laserdisc player, trying to decide if I want to wait 3 months for it to arrive or pay for faster shipping. I have to say I'm really impressed with the Domesday Duplicator and ld-decode software. Some of the discs look like high definition in places, even with YouTube compression. I'm glad I got so many discs, especially as some Hard Offs are no longer carrying them. Of course now I have seen how well VHS can come out as well I'm going to be forced to buy those as well..

@Lessigen I got around it (even though i can ask people around me to help translate) by just using google lens or wechat translate. For most items, its good enough to get basic understanding and figure out rest. What i notice on Ali is sometimes the pricing is different from Taobao but its per item. It's something to do with the exchange rate they use to convert to Canadian Dollars i guess. It is great to have J-Scale and i can see myself using it time to time depending on the shipping rates of Asia. That and the rising YEN to Cad (almost PAR again) is really limiting where we can buy the stuff.

According to their latest wechat post, Changming announced that they officially closed reservations for the CR200J as of Apr 21 13:00 China Standard Time, which made the reservation window less than 10 days. Apparently they have received over 2000 orders. That's a crazy short period of time. Hopefully everyone got their reservations in! For sure, I'm grateful that J-Scale was set up. I don't know what kind of black magic you guys do to find some really rare limited train sets especially brand-new or get export-limited items but it's awesome you managed to figure out something. Before the proliferation of some of the more niche items on Aliexpress and Temu I used Taobao a lot. A pain to navigate due to the language barrier/translation issues and supremely annoying to register as my phone wouldn't receive the SMS text for some reason back in the day, but they do offer great prices. I got some 2.5Gbe PoE switches and portable USB-C monitors from some vendors back then, though it's so much easier to get it from Aliexpress nowadays.

Aaah that does ring a bell now. 900mm x 300mm x 40mm. Basically a triple ttrak module with the tracks going down the center. Jeff

Again always amazes me 28 pieces of rail will bend so well on the transports! Even though my brain knows the physics part of my brain says thats just not right! jeff

Indeed, they have been making some very good headway on that lately. With the announcement of Yufuin no Mori II and the recent re-release of the Class 1000 Shinkansen prototypes (after their initial Dec 2005 launch), I would love to see a re-release of the 922 Series Doctor Yellow or even the 925 Series Doctor Yellow. It's been quite a long time for some of those 922 variants (8y for -0 and 17y for -10 subseries respectively).

It always amazes me the rail will bend so well on these carriers! Jeff

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/ Edit: I am wrong about the Yufuin no Mori II being new, however the last iteration of it (A8247) was released in October 2006...

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