Getting Started with Train Sets & Model Railways

hello there everybody Sam strain - and welcome back to the railway and welcome to a bit of a different video because I often get messages about how to get started with the Hobby how to buy your first strains how to get it all started and how to learn the limbo as it were so yeah that's what I thought I'll try and do today I'm going to try and cover as much as I possibly can about getting started with your first train set or model railway so I'm going to cover buying your first train how to go about it and where to look then I'm going to go over setting up your track and running your first trains then I'm going to talk a little bit more about extra locomotives and what I recommend and I'm also going to tell you about my top 5 list of beginner locomotives and there's some lovely ones on there so stick around for that then I'm going to teach you how to look after things how to maintain things as well and of course along the way I'm going to give you some of my own hints and tips to try and help you out and make things easier so let's talk about getting in there then actually buying your first bits of train set or you know your first track your first locomotives so you've really got two routes the first route is the train set route and there's a few pros and cons to buying a train set and we'll go over that in a moment and the second route which is a bit well it sounds a bit more scary but it's not really it's to actually buy everything separately and there's a few pros and cons to that too so let's talk about train sets then and starter sets just like you'd find a home B for example so the pros they have an OK price generally the price isn't terrible but normally you can do better by buying things separately but ok second of all the starter set will have everything you need to get started and it should be reasonably easy to get set up so it's new it's going to be ready to run and it should be fairly easy there are a few cons though first of all you haven't got an awful lot of choice of course there is quite a range of different starter sets but you can't choose exactly what locomotive you have you can't choose your rolling stock and you can't choose what sort of track you end up and the other con is they can be pricey some of them are okay some of them are not ok so let's talk about going onto eBay or wherever and buying things separately so the pros of that generally it is cheaper not all the time but generally it does cap keeper secondly there is a great choice out there you can mix and match virtually everything you can choose your locomotives you can choose your rolling stock you can choose your controller and you can customize it to your own tastes cons it can be confusing of course knowing exactly what to buy if you're just getting started and of course the postage costs could add up as well so yeah it's quite confusing obviously and there's a lot to go through here but I think the best thing to do now is to go shopping so I'm going to take you shopping right now we're going to go down to the computer we're going to go online and that will see what we can't find and I will show you exactly what you need to get started and I will show you how to go about getting it either in a train set which is pretty easy or doing it yourself and buying everything separately so yep let's go shopping okay so we're on the internet and we're gonna head straight for home be calm to see what's on offer there and we're gonna go and look for a train set and if that's the route you want to go down that's all you've got to do you've got to find the train set order it'll come to your door and then you can move on but what I'm also going to do is we're going to look at what they offer for what price and then we're going to take to eBay and have a look on there and see if we can't match it and just you know see how much it costs if we do it a different way so yeah we're going to go to analog train sets here scroll down let's see we can find your basic Oh for Oh starter set this one will do the gwr passenger freight train set so let's just pause here let's see what we've got it's $89.99 so plus postage it's gonna be at least 90 pounds isn't it you know maybe 95 and let's look what we have here you've got a little o4o locomotive two wagons and a small passenger coati thing so yeah that's fairly basic well have we got track wise so you've got some third radius curbs you've got some straights you've got some pot you've got a point you've got a buffer stop and you've also got the controller and whatnot over there so yep okay I think we get it that's what you get for ninety pounds so let's head to ebay right the first thing we're going to look for is the little engine home bo4 oh now you can get them new you can get them used generally there's nothing really that can go wrong with these but you know 10 to 15 pounds is about what you'll pay I'm look on here see what we can see our here's one look this is a special one so this is going to be more expensive ten quid it looks to be in excellent condition a little oh four oh so you know it's going to be less than fifteen quid so let's add that to the total right what's next we're going to look for the wagons now normally you can pay two to three pounds for wagons and they don't have to be new you know they can be new if you want them to be nothing can go wrong with wagons so we're going to go have a look at an auction see if we can't find some decent wagons here here you go there's five there four well it's bids and these end in two hours so there are eight pounds but normally you'd expect that to go for about three pounds each so what call it fifteen quid for five of them there so you could get fire wagons there which you know is two more than you'd get from the set okay so let's look for some curves then see what they would cost I'll just set this to buy now and here we go here's eight of them exactly what you get in the set for ten pounds they're free postage so you could buy those and that would be just fine so we'll add that to the total okay now let's look for the power track now I did see a listing on here which actually has the controller and the power pack together for about 25 pounds yet there it is $24.99 free postage you get your controller and your track and also you can make an offer on this one so you could get it for a pound or two cheaper who knows so yep that's 25 quid dubbed up to the total then okay now we're going to look for a point and there's one right there that's a standard right hand point 849 free post it's just the job it's new yep that'll do add that to the total let's look for some straights then now this is a bit of a can of worms because straights are sometimes quite hard to find but yet if you shop around you can get them quite cheap but I'm going to just grab the first one we see there's some look $10.99 brand new not been used yet and there's ten of those so that's a lot more than you'd get in a train set so 1099 you could pay less if you shopped around but that'll do so we'll add that to the total then and I'll just think is there anything else we need to get yes we need one of those point characters which is a little bit of second radius curvature which will just straighten out the point so let's just grab one of these let's have a look down the list yep it'll just be the single curve look at that one pound plus 130 postage so literally nothing and you can get those in model shops you can get them anywhere so add a pound to that then and yet that's how much it would cost on eBay so it turns out it's a little bit cheaper and plus of course you get to choose exactly what you want to buy and you can mix and match so suppose then that you've gone out and bought yourself a train set or you bought all the parts of a train set well what do you do next well it is quite straightforward so don't worry but obviously it can be a little bit confusing so I'm going to show you exactly what you need to do I'm going to demonstrate so I'm going to be assembling this which is the Thomas the Tank Engine train set this is just the little one with the loop of track but hopefully if I show you how to set this one up it should sort of explain how to set any train setup so I've already got this one packed so all you're going to need is the third radius the curves a couple of straights or however many straights you like and of course you need the locomotive and whatever rolling stock comes with it whether it's Thomas whether it's not it doesn't matter of course you're going to need your controller and your power pack so I've split this up basically into four very simple steps and the first step is to assemble your track work so I'm going to move all the other stuff out the way I'm just going to keep the track in the shop for you so all you've got to do really is learn how to put two pieces of track together I want you that you can create anything you like and it is fairly simple to put them together there's no real trick to it but you do have to make sure that each fish plate goes into each other properly I'll show you that in just a second I'm just going to take this packaging off because this truck has never been used before okay so what you're going to want to do is we're going to make sort of like an oval but I'm not going to do it all on camera I'm just going to show you how to bits of track go together so we'll take two of these curves then and try putting these together now it might be best to do this flush with the floor or the carpet but I'm just going to lift it up so that you can see so you basically want to line up each fish plate when the fish plates are just the joiners with the piece of track and when they're lined up you want to push them together now sometimes this can happen let me show you you see so if it happens like this you can see that this one is connected properly but this one hasn't gone in and that can happen all the time I mean it you won't notice really if it's on the ground it doesn't look particularly noticeable until your trains come across it and they'll derail so you want to make sure that they are connecting properly and that's all there is to it so I'm going to go ahead and finish building this Olav track and what I've done that I'll show you the second step all right so I've built the Oval of track and there it is and yet there's nothing more to tell you about building the track other than the fact that you'll notice there's this here right there and that is the power track and you should have got one of those if you bought a train set and equally you need to buy something like that if you're buying all the parts separately and there you can see it closed up there of course and the power track is what connects your controller to the two rails so I'll show you how we get the second step underway and the second step is just power how do we power up the rails okay so to set up power then I've told you about the power track and as you can see the power track has been built on to this loop with the power outlet facing the outside and that's generally a good idea so I'm going to take the controller then there it is and that's the home B one and yes these home B ones are just fine and they do the job and I think that they are cheap but they do the job just fine okay so I'm just going to get this one backed get this wire free and there's all sorts of string and things on this one so I'm just going to do my best to very quickly get this off so that we could move on okay there we go so you've got this cable which is attached to the controller and you'll also have a transformer which you will need to plug in eventually but all you need to do is take these two pins as you can see and plug them in to your power track now this is a little bit fiddly but all you've got to do is get the holes lined up like this if it's possible and then shove it in like that you need to push these little blocks down now bear in mind the orientation of this little plug will affect the direction of your locomotives on the track so if you find that they go the wrong way so when you set the controller forwards if they go backwards you need to just take this out flip it over and pull back in but that's all it takes that's all you need to do so the next job then there's the controller let's get the transformer out of its packaging here it is okay I'm not going to bother with unpacking this right now you plug it into your controller and you're ready to go plug this in and then you should be ready to go okay so by now I've covered steps 1 & 2 we've built the track and we've got it ready to go and if you look if I turn that knob yes we've got power so the next thing is running trains now you'll also notice that I'm on carpet here and carpet is the number one killer of model steam trains so what can you do about it well the most obvious thing to do is use a track mat now do you need a track mat no I'm going to say no but yeah let me get this one open I don't use mine but you can see oh my god all right you can see on this track map this will lie on the carpet and this would protect your trains from the carpet normal dust and dirt but as you can see it has a very specific track plan and if you deviate away from this track plan if you want to try an experiment then this track mat is no longer useful so what can you do about it well you look like mad by all these if you've got one and you just want to use the original track that came with your train set yeah use it but if like me you want to try and you know build a custom track then the track now isn't going to be very useful and that's what I found when I started off so what do you do I use sheets of paper now this does the exact same thing it is a little bit it doesn't look quite as nice but it means you can go all the way around the living room if you want to and you are protected against the carpet now you might think I'm a bit of a hypocrite because I do run my trains on this carpet but this is a very short cup it's a very old carpet and it's been well trodden down it's not very fluffy anymore so it really doesn't produce a lot of dust and dirt but I do vacuum it very regularly so this is what I used to do on a very fluffy carpet in the living room whatever I used to put the pieces of paper underneath each piece of track and it does use quite a lot of paper of course but it does save your locomotives which will save you a lot of money in the long run and of course all this paper is more than usable afterwards you know it doesn't do anything to it and you know it's not going to get oily or anything like that so yes you must protect your engines against the carpets otherwise you're just going to spend your whole time fishing bits of dust and dirt out of the locomotives and it eventually will kill them okay so that's a little bit of local protection so let's talk about getting your engines ready to run them here we go here zarnian Clarabel and here's Thomas now getting them onto the track might seem like an easy job but actually it can be a little bit fiddly but you just got to make sure every wheel goes onto the track properly and you can check it so let's do it now the best advice I can give you is do it on a straight it's a lot easier so here we go we've got a knee here let's put a knee on just make sure each wheel goes on and Clarabel and as you'll notice I'm just pushing these coaches together and they're clicking together with their couplings like that now if you want to own a couple well that's easy I just hold onto one grab the one who want to uncouple twist it and it comes off quite nicely if you're trying to sort of get to a bar at their own level it's not going to work that easily but you can do it by hook or by crook anyway so let's get these rails up there and this does take practice so don't don't give up and yet there we go Thomas and alien Clarabel Thomas was derailed so now and we're ready to go so let me just make sure we are ready to go okay now we'll give her a little bit of juice all him a little bit of juice and the way he goes and that's how you do it that's how you get set up and as you can see Thomas is running quite nicely and that is the basics so now we're going to talk about expanding your fleet and you know once you get your train set and you've got a little engine like this it's just the job it's perfect to get you into the Hobby but you soon might find that it's a little bit math and it's a little bit boring so you might want to expand and when you want to expand you've got basically four choices and here we have now there are more choices out there but I think for a beginner these are the ones you need to consider so we have Holmby railroad old back when I call it home B railways and modern Backman and we're going to going to sort of talk about these very quickly has a little bit of a buying guide I think for a beginner the one you're going to want to focus on is this this is the home B railroad and you can recognize this because it's got half of the box red half of it yellow and there's no picture on the front just got a window into the front of the box and I cannot recommend these highly enough and they're fantastic and basically these are the sort of budget range they don't have a lot of detail on them but they're very robust and that they tend to be very well built and for beginners I think these are fantastic so that's Hornby that's home B railroad now if you want something a little bit more serious you can move on to this which is Hornby railways and you can normally recognize these by the fact that they've got the little red stripe at the bottom they have an image on the front and the rest of the box is this sort of creamy color and these are the more premium models they tend to cost a little bit more they have a lot more detail on them and they're more for the serious modeler so be careful because these models are a little bit more delicate and they won't take as much you know they won't take as much knocking around as the railroad range will but certainly wouldn't you're used to running locomotives and you used to maintaining them and all that sort of thing the railways range is fantastic now we're going to move on to old Backman now these are the old-style Packman and you can't really get these new anymore you can only buy these secondhand but you can tell what these are by the fact that they have this fluffy lid or this kind of box with the picture on the front and these are basically a little bit like the home B rail range except they're a little bit older they tend to have a little bit more detail but they're very very cheap so if you want a cheap locomotive that has good detail it's not quite up to modern standards but I can highly recommend these is a great range of them this one is the J 39 the Batman J 39 you can see it there yeah they're great models they do tend to need a little bit of maintenance so I'm going to talk about maintenance later so you do need to know what you're doing sort of but if you want a cheap locomotive that is robust well-built and you know easily runnable then old Batman is just the job now if you want something very serious if you want a locomotive that is absolutely top of the range for modern modelers you want modern Backman now this is probably the most expensive of them all and you can always recognize on modern Batman locomotive because again it's in this blue box with the little window in the front and it's got the red band at the bottom and it's also always got some info on the back now these are the top of the range models they do tend to cost a little bit more but they're very high quality they run fantastically and therefore the Sirius modeler this one is the Robinson oh four and yeah I wouldn't necessarily recommend these for beginners but wouldn't you get your head around it all I think these are a good idea so yes these four choices are what I recommend you stick to now if you want you know your vintage locomotives you can stop looking at trying and red and that sort of thing but really if you starting off these four are the best way to go especially the Holmby railroad if I had to choose one for you I would say Holmby railroad because they are brilliant okay so here's my top five locomotives for beginners there so number five then we've already looked at it it's the home B Thomas now I think a good proportion of those of you who are trying to get into this hobby are probably fans of Thomas now Thomas is a great locomotive to buy if you're not too sure about it all if you're very new Thomas is a good one because you know everybody recognizes him the home B one is quite well built it is quite cheap but it should be quite robust and they do run quite well so Thomas is a fun one now number four the next best one I think is a railways model home B railways model so it is the top of the range but it's the J 50 now the reason I recommend that one is because it's very very well built it has got a lot of detail so it will introduce you to better detailed models but at the same time it's very robust and you won't break it easily and it looks just fantastic on any railway so yes the home BJ 50 check it out it's also quite cheap and I think about 70 pounds ish is what you can pay for that number three then is the home B railroad county class so this is the home B budget range and it's a little for for Oh looks like that and it is just fantastic they run brilliantly the detail on them is pretty good and they're grateful and of course the county class has a tender as well so if you want to sort of introduce yourself to tender locomotives slightly bigger locomotives that is a great one to go for and again they're quite cheap 60 70 pounds on eBay very good number two then one of my absolute favorites this is the home B railroad a4 and this one's Mallard and it's just a fantastic model they are a little bit more expensive 80 to 100 pounds probably and that they are wonderful they've just they're so beautiful everybody's heard of Mallard they run fantastically the detail is okay you know it is a railroad model but they do run very well and the detail is pretty good you want to be careful not to buy a DCCC fitted one and DCC is another kettle of fish so look into that if that's something that interests you but if you've just got the standard Hornby controller you want DCC ready and it looks like that on the box number one then my top model for beginners is this one it's the Hornby tornado and I think this is a railroad model but you can get it in various sets and whatnot it's a fantastic model it's absolutely beautiful as you can see and the detail on them is really quite good but they are again very robust very cheap to buy and that they just fantastic locomotives so if you're unsure if you totally unsure what to do if you have no clue try a Hornby tornado they're not going to set you back too far in terms of the cost and I don't think you'll regret it okay so that is my top five list any of those really are fantastic for beginners okay next up then I'm going to talk a little bit about maintenance so maintenance is a very important thing when it comes to the hobby and I can't go into it in too much detail now but I can give you the very basics so the first thing you need to maintain is the track and over time over you know a week two weeks a month RAK will get dirty and it will mean that your locals won't run properly because if there's dirt on the rails the power can't go to the wheels of the logo and they don't get their power so you've got to make sure the tracks are clean now if you start going into truck cleaning you probably never get out of it there are so many different ways of track cleaning there's the truck cleaning wagons there are the track magic track cleaning solution you've got track rubbers you've got cardboard you've got all kinds of things but the best way to do it is to use the Pico track cleaners now yeah it's not the cheapest way but it's free it's easy and it works fantastically I've tried them all this is the best you can get these for about three pounds I think they are a Hatton's and they look like this it's just a rubber and all you need to do is you take your track you can leave it set up you don't have to take it apart like this and you just rub over the track like that that gets the track perfectly clean no messing about these rubbers last ages I've they last me about three years they're fantastic they're just what you need and look that truck is visibly shiny so that is truck cleaning you need to do that I do it every month these rubbers by the way they don't damage the track I've used these for four or five years on my track every single month and I'm still using the same tracks four or five years later so yeah it's a myth that these damage the track okay next up then you need to maintain your rolling stock and here is Clarabel in a little locomotive cradle and basically all I do is clean the wheels as you can see these wheels are very clean and I use these to clean it cotton buds and lighter fluid now be careful if you're using lighter fluid because it's not very nice stuff you don't want to eat it and you really don't want to breathe it so use this in a well-ventilated area we need to do I'm not going to actually do it because these are clean you get your cotton bud you pour a little bit of the lighter fluid on it and you clean each wheel like this lalala what you also need to do is oil the axles now the best oil is the sewing machine oil that you can find on Amazon you don't want to use three in one because that eats away at the different materials you just want something to lubricate now I put my sewing machine oil into here which is an oiling pen and that means that you can get in there and oil the axles and that's all you need to do to keep your rolling stock happy and you know as long as no hairs get in between these axles that's fine now you need to do the same with your locomotives as well now the best thing to do there's two things you can do if you want to know how to service your locomotives first of all read your Hornby instruction manuals they will tell you where you need to oil normally it's just the bearings and the gears and whatnot you need to do that roughly every six months the second thing you can do is check out here on YouTube I for one I've got loads and loads and loads of model maintenance videos and check out my model maintenance playlist that shows you how to service all different kinds of locomotives and if you find that I've not done a video on how to service a particular locomotive or a particular sort of locomotive please drop me a message please drop me a comment and I will do that immediately and make a video on it so yes maintenance it's very important it's a big can of worms but if you do it properly your locos can run for years hopefully all right then folks hopefully that should have been quite a good introduction to the model railways hobby if you've got any questions at all please feel free to post them in the comments and when we're talking about fully grown men playing with toy trains there really are no silly questions so please feel free to ask anything you like and of course if you want to know more about the Hobby and you know you want to just get used to things please check out the rest of my channel I've got hundreds of reviews of locomotives if you want to know what to buy and rolling stock of running sessions there's all sorts out there so what do check some of that out if you want to and also if you want to you can send in your pictures photos or drawings to Sam strains at outlook.com I'll print them off and put them up on the wall here so that everybody can see them and also if you'd like to you can check out the Facebook and Twitter pages at facebook.com/ forward slash Sam strains and Twitter comm forward slash Sam strains they may be useful if you want to get in touch with people or in touch with me to talk about certain things that's all fine and that's all good so please do that but for now thank you very much for watching very nice to have your company of course and I do that was helpful okay everybody see you very soon cheers everyone

Channel: Sam'sTrains

Views: 379,530

Rating: 4.8988876 out of 5

Keywords: samstrains, models, hornby, steam, tri-ang, 00 gauge, railway, diesel, class, review, unboxing, bachmann, trains, model railways, hobby, getting started, how to, hornby train set, tutorial, locomotive, starter set, 0-4-0, buying guide, Iphone, railmaster, DCC

Id: 2VJXHkZwWsg

Length: 26min 14sec (1574 seconds)

Published: Wed Nov 16 2016