Usenet has several model railroading groups but none targeting modular or sectional model railroading.
Most well known and largest is rec.models.railroad with over 100,000 messages as of June 2007. There is a large amount of useful general model railroading information that is best found using a search engine, like Google. Being usenet, it is unmoderated, and cluttered by trolls and spam.
alt.models.railroad.ho has about 4400 posts and alt.models.railroad.n has a little more than 100 posts. There is no alt.models.railroad group. The N scale group has light traffic and less spam and trolls. The HO scale group has moderate traffic and more spam/trolls. Google Groups search is my prefered method of searching these groups.
The Gauge modular forum is moderated by admin “Mason Jar”. The forum is moderated, friendly and covers all aspects of modular and sectional railroading. in all scales and gauges. The sticky “Modular Railroading Resources” has helpful and useful information. It is moderately busy with several posts per week.
All-Model-Railroading forums has a modular forum. The forums are very busy, and the modular forum gets a lot of looks, but is only moderately busy. “shamus” is the forum admin. Instead of stickies, this forum has a read-only library archive of helpful suggestions. There are a lot of very high quality “how-to” type tutorials featuring lots of photos on AMR.
Yahoo groups has several modular railroading groups. There is a North American Free-mo group that is active and the forums for the Free-mo.org website and modular standards. Another yahoo group, small-layout-design, focuses on very small, but complete layouts. A large layout for this group would be 2 by 4 feet. SLD frequently references Carl Arendt’s excellent Micro Layout website. Arendt’s website features over 600 micro layouts, mostly very small switching and industrial scenes.
Yahoo’s MicroModular Railroading (“MMRR”) has 156 members states that it covers all aspects of modular/sectional home layouts in all gauges. MMRR has about a dozen posts per year. Jack’s Modular shelf layout details the construction of an around the walls, lightweight extruded foam modules that are supported on shelf brackets and is a valuable resource.
Portable_On30 specializes in narrow gauge On30 portable layouts. The group has 237 members and about 150 posts a year. The files section is packed with useful information has details on at least three kinds of module frames, several styles of adjustable legs and excellent photo galleries.
Finally, Yahoo’s LayoutConstruction group has over 3500 members and averages 300 to 600 posts per month for a total of nearly 26,000 messages. LayoutConstruction includes a number of lightweight framing, scenery and joining methods that are of useful to builders of sectional layouts and railroad modules.
The Yahoo group, HOmodules, focuses mainly on NMRA compliant modules and the group ntrak focuses on N-trak modules. Given N-trak’s popularity, it is surprising that HOmodules has 650 members, Free-mo has 892 members, while ntrak has 544 members.
The Sipping and Switching Society (“S&SS”) of North Carolina has a Yahoo group. S&SS builds modules to their own high standards, both the “waffle” style construction and track interface are unique.
The HOG RR is an innovative sectional railroad in both concept and construction that bills itself as “a better beginner’s layout”. The HOG is a four section small layout that can be operated from the outside or from the center. It takes up or requires about the same space as the traditional 4×8 ft plywood sheet. The HOG RR Yahoo group discusses the construction of the prototype and variations on the HOG design theme.
Model Railroader magazine forums are very large, active and moderated during the week. Besides banning trolls, spam, advertising and flames, the admins will delete entire threads that have comments that are unfavorable to the magazine’s (Sponsor’s) content, size or the abundance of “special issues”. The MRR General Discussion forum is probably the largest model railroading forum on the internet and the knowledge of the particpants is wide and deep. The forum search feature is very useful and the Index of Model Railroading magazines from 1933 to the present is very useful. The index includes non-Kalmbach magazines. Free registration is required to access this resource.
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