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Last night I was looking through some of my older model railraoding magazines and I got a reminder of just how far N scale has come. Back in the late eighties or early nineties, I bought a soft cover book entitled THE N SCALE MODEL RAILROADING MANUAL. It is a compilation of various articles from Model Railroading magazine. It has several performance reports on N scale engines. The articles are all subtitled "How it runs and how You can make it run better." Each article has a picture of the mechanism under the shell. Even in the most expensive brass imports the mechanisms were pitiful. Not even the Atlas engines had flywheels. <br /> Some of these engines I have owned. Among them are the Con Cor SD40-2, manufactured in Austria, theBachmann GP40, the Bachmann N scale 4-8-4, the Minitrix N scale U28C (made in West Germany), and a pre-flywheel Atlas RS-3, among others. The "state of the art" was the Minitrix engine. <br /> The body shells and details are unacceptable by today's standards. Some of them were praised for their detail! Soldered wires to the trucks, instead of brass wipers, were the norm. None came with factory installed knuckle couplers. The mechanisms-junk! I had forgotten these engines and how they ran. The best runners then would now be considered mediocre to poor runners today. I still have a few pre-fly wheel Atlas engines, but the others are long gone. Most were traded or sold for model railroad equipment. A few were junked years ago. <br /> In this era of super detailed locos with mechanisms that could rival that of a Swiss watch, we need only to look back a few years ago ( to us old farts) and dust off our memories to see how far we have come!
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