Toy train mechanic Dick Teal demonstrates techniques for keeping toy trains from contemporary manufacturers in excellent condition. Includes steps for proper lubrication, TMCC/DCS troubleshooting, and the right way to replace traction tires, batteries, and light bulbs. It's the essential workbench guide for toy train operators. Edited by Classic Toy Trains editor Neil Besougloff.

Text and photographs present a history of toy trains.

The author shows you how to build a hi-rail toy train layout such as his Sandy Harbor Terminal Railway. He provides modeling concepts as well as practical techniques for incorporating toy trains and accessories into realistic settings.

Learn how to take it apart, fix it, rewire it, and make your Lionel train or accessory work again! Step-by-step instructions in this detailed 21-project book can help you get your collection running.

Features practical advice on operating Lionel's new Legacy command control system and updated information for running MTH's DCS system as well as Lionel's earlier TrainMaster system.

During the tumultuous year of 2008--when gas prices reached $4 a gallon, Amtrak set ridership records, and a commuter train collided with a freight train in California--journalist James McCommons spent a year on America's trains, talking to the people who ride and work the rails throughout much of the Amtrak system. Organized around these rail journeys, Waiting on a Train is equal parts travel narrative, personal memoir, and investigative journalism. Readers meet the historians, railroad executives, transportation officials, politicians, government regulators, railroad lobbyists, and passenger-rail advocates who are rallying around a simple question: Why has the greatest railroad nation in the world turned its back on the very form of transportation that made modern life and mobility possible? Distrust of railroads in the nineteenth century, overregulation in the twentieth, and heavy government subsidies for airports and roads have left the country with a skeletal intercity passenger-rail system. Amtrak has endured for decades, and yet failed to prosper owing to a lack of political and financial support and an uneasy relationship with the big, remaining railroads. While riding the rails, McCommons explores how the country may move passenger rail forward in America--and what role government should play in creating and funding mass-transportation systems. Against the backdrop of the nation's stimulus program, he explores what it will take to build high-speed trains and transportation networks, and when the promise of rail will be realized in America.

From personalizing memorials and visitations to aftercare for the bereaved, this thoughtful manual helps owners and staff of funeral homes and cemeteries better understand their customers and the special needs in tending to the grieving and burial process. Explaining the evolution and prospects of today's "experience economy" customer, this motivational resource offers practical guidance for exceeding expectations and provides suggestions for service issues particular to funeral homes, such as first impressions, telephone skills, competition, and arrangements. With the more than 70 issues addressed, funeral professionals will be able to meet and exceed the sensitive necessities of families in pain.