Charlie's Blog

Ben shared a picture of his layout, all in Marklin M-track with many buildings, structures and cars that many of us remember from our childhood. His collection even has the old turntable. The layout gets powered by a CS3, a perfect illustration how you can combine the old with the new when it comes to Marklin. Many things are backwards compatible.   The diagonal running track meets the turntable. This is one of the advantages with the Marklin 3-rail system. You can create turn loops without worrying about short circuits.   Thanks for sharing with us Ben!  

One of our long time customers and valued friends Mark M shared some pictures of his progress on his French section on the layout. You can click on the images to get a larger view. Mark's work has a high level of detail, which makes it so much fun to study the scenes. We all can draw some inspiration of his craftsmanship. Thank you Mark for sharing!   Here are a couple more photos of the French side of my layout.  In the first photo, a SBB Vetron waits with a container train while a TGV Duplex loads passengers.  The Vectron is...

Hello Charlie, what is the difference between the curve 20130 and 24130?   Marklin's C-track item numbers start with 24and have five digits. For example 24130 or 24612. They decided to bring out some special combination packs of C-track for our Marklin Startup line. This makes it easier or more attractive for beginning (younger) Marklinists to add track to their inventory. Instead of boxes, a visually more attractive blister packaging is used. These track pieces are identical C-track, but the packaging is re-numbered starting with 20 instead of 24. This, a package of 20130 contains three actual 24130 pieces. A...

I am putting my track plan together.  It is a digital layout andI will be running my locos digitally.  I would like to know if I can manually control thru control boxes and a separate transformer my turnouts?  I know that I will not have to connect the decoder to the turnout motor.So can I do it manually?  If so is there a way you could explain how I can accomplish this without frying my electronics?I would like control signals this way in the future also.I just like the idea of looking at a control panel and pressing buttons. Yes you can run...