Last year, I got a Minitrains Forney for Boothbay Railway Village, and installed a decoder in it. Got an article published in Narrow Gauge & Shortline Gazette about it. They seem to be well made, but a bit fragile if you want to take one apart to add a decoder.
This is a link to their products pagehttp://www.minitrains.eu/mt-prod.html
They talk about HOe which is about the same as HOn30, both run on track with standard gauge N scale rail spacing
George In Midcoast Maine, 'bout halfway up the Rockland branch
I have built a couple of 'critters' in HOn30 scale which is the same as HOe. Basically it is HO scale locomotives running on N scale track. Most N scale track does not have realistic tie size or spacing but Peco makes flex track and turnouts which better represent the tie spacing that a small narrow gauge railway might have. The ties are deliberately not all symetrical. The spacing is a bit uneven and the ties have irregular ends.
My critters (see the one in my avatar) use a Bachmann 4-4-0 steam locomotive as the donor for the drive mechanism. The drive motor is in the tender and there is a drive shaft that turns the locomotive wheels.
There isn't much left of the original 4-4-0 when my scratch building is done. This is the original engine:
This plus the tender is all that gets used in my critters. Actually, the side rods get discarded too:
Here is one under construction:
They are DC. There really isn't any space for a decoder unless you were to add a second gondola. The wiring would get a bit complex if you were to attempt that. I think the biggest problem would be the stiffness of the wires which might cause the gondolas to derail.
Dave
I'm just a dude with a bad back having a lot of fun with model trains, and finally building a layout!
Roco MinitrainS are a thing of the past. IIRC, they were marketed under the brand of AHM in the 1970s and early 1980s in the US.
Roco does have European prototype HOe gauge locos and cars, which are quite nice, but also quite expensive.
There is also Minitrains, a brand which aims at reviving the old Egger range of HOe products, plus some very interesting additions of WW I light railway equipment.
Both Roco HOe and the new Minitrains HOe stuff are excellent runners.
Is there anyone out there that has modeled in this scale or has experience with Roco MiniTrainS?