News: Web Site Changes

As the NASG webmaster, I want to be clear that I had nothing to do with the web site-related "comment" in the Pop Valve section of the July/August 2026 issue of the NASG's Dispatch. I do not know who put it there. However, I am 99% sure that the text was generated using A.I. (artificial intelligence); it lists the engine used "claude.ai".

The loads listing for freight cars in the Product Gallery section of this web site, has been fully reviewed and updated. Over 100 entries have been added to what our "old-format" listing had. While a handful of manufacturers are no longer active (primarily due to the 2024 bankruptcy of Shapeways), a number of new manufacturers have recently sprung up, such as Amatos Toy and Hobby, jacklynliv, and Depot G Hobbies (all on eBay), and Cohn's Custom, Milwaukee Flyer, Model Scenery World, Phil's Train Layout Store, and Tully Models (all with dedicated web sites). Plenty to explore, and make your freight cars look more "lived in".

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Wayne Hills has been studying the history of Precision Scale Co's Sn3 cars for a while now, as well as collecting them. He provided a good number of photos of cars and their original boxes, which have been added to this web site's Product Gallery. PSC's numbering system is confusing as they re-used some of them over time, and for 1990 they labeled their boxes for the release year, but not for cars prior or after that. So, this has been a real detective effort on Wayne's part.

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Tom Kaufman sent in photos of a new display layout that he and his wife Jill have created. It has an interesting backstory.

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Now that all locomotives and all rolling stock (i.e. cars) have been fully documented, today's update of the web site adds a completely new report to the Product Gallery. It is found on the main Product Gallery page, in its "Quick Jump" section. It is called "Manufacturers Overview". For all of the product categories that have been thoroughly reviewed so far, that page shows all of the names of the manufacturers, and links to each of the product categories for which they made models. Note that when you click on one of these category links, a new tab will open in your web browser (if that's how you have your browser set up), so that you can potentially compare several companies' product listing, for example, or easily see all of the products a company has produced. The top of that report page indicates how many individual entries have been thoroughly reviewed so far. Note that we have over another 10,000 product entries listed in the "old listing" that still need to be reviewed. This is why the Welcome page states that we have over 21,000 products documented. These "unreviewed" entries will be added to this new report listing over time.

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The Product Gallery's listing of tank cars has been thoroughly reviewed, updated, and corrected. Over 80 entries were missing from the "old" listing.

The "major milestone" is that this completes the listing of all locomotives and all freight cars, all passenger cars, all m.o.w. cars, and all cabooses. So, this means that our web site now has every known engine and piece of rolling stock documented. This covers all American Flyer, all standard-gauge S, and all Sn42, Sn3, and Sn2 narrow-gauge models. That comes out to a total of right around 9,000 product/model IDs or SKUs of locomotives and cars produced in S since 1937 (almost 90 years!).

As the webmaster, I have been working on this listing for a number of years now, but it is worth the effort, to finally have a definitive and complete listing of these S products, all with full details, most with photos, and some even with links to videos. However, the work is not yet done. I will soon start on the other sub-categories. Plus, I have some more enhancements in mind.

And, of course, I am always open to further corrections. If you know of an item in existence that is not listed, it is highly likely due to my ignorance of that model. By all means, let me know, so that I can add it to our listing. I am also very interested in more and better photos. Especially for entries where we have no photos at all.

Thank you to all who have contributed photos and data. And, of course, as more information comes to light, and more models are produced, these listings will be updated quickly.

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The digital PDF file of the May/June 2026 Dispatch issue is now available on this web site via the "Members Only" portal. Also, the May/June 2025 Dispatch issue is now publicly available (its articles have also been indexed).

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Since this web site covers all aspects of S and the NASG, as the webmaster, I inadvertently wind up with a high-level overview of what is going on. For the first three months of this year, we've had a large number of new members added to the NASG's roster. We averaged over two new members every three days for the first 90 days of this year. Some days the payments coming in were only new members!

So, welcome to all of the new members! It is my hope that you find this web site useful and enjoyable.

I also want to thank all of you active members who are out there showing S to the public. The new members were from all over the country, and so there was not one specific event that somehow brought in lots of people. Your taking a bit of time to show S to people in the audience at a local show may well have been the tipping point to them becoming a member.

New members also, hopefully, means new customers for our many vendors. Those of us who have been in the scale for a long time, sometimes decades, and sometimes all of our lives, may well have everything that we need to model what we want. Some may have way more stashed away than we need. Use this web site's Product Gallery to find out what has been produced (recently or in the past) and then contact a current vendor (see the Resources section) or fellow S modelers to see if the item of interest is available. With patience and diligence, it is definitely possible to build a satisfactory layout in S, large or small. See the Layouts section for inspiration!

As always, thank you to all people (members or not) whom have contributed photos and data to augment the content of this web site. I really appreciate that. Your photos and information are what make this site useful to others. And I'm having a blast working on it.

All S-scale stock cars ever produced have been thoroughly reviewed and are now fully documented in this web site's Product Gallery.

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The "Welcome" page of the web site has been slightly modified, as we were getting an overwhelming amount of content on it. Mostly, the home page photo descriptions were moved to a secondary page, as visitors are likely to only want to view the texts associated with new photos added since their last visit here. Conversely, this would, theoretically, also allow for more text to be associated with a photo. The green back arrow shown on the upper right corner of those secondary pages will take you back to the main Welcome page.

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The public version of the March/April 2025 issue of the NASG's Dispatch is now available. Also, the members-only issue of the March/April 2026 Dispatch PDF can now be downloaded via the "Members Only" portal.

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Don Thompson provided a PDF of a scan of the 1971 Enhorning decals catalog.

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By request, I have added a permanent page to this web site honoring our memory of Jettie Padgett. Please let me know of any corrections or additions. If you would like to share your story of interacting with Jettie, send me an e-mail and I'll be happy to add it to that page.

(as an aside, and for future reference, Jettie was already in the NASG's Hall of Fame page, so there is a link to his new page next to his entry there; you can get there by clicking on the "NASG" button, then click on "NASG Annual Awards", and then "NASG Hall of Fame".)

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Brooks Stover has made available an article about how to take fully in-focus photos of your layout or models using an iPhone and an easy-to-use photo-stacking software application. Contains complete step-by-step instructions. This is well worth a read, even if you don't use an iPhone. This and other articles are available via the "Downloadable Documents" page of this web site.

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• Other Documents

Bill Lane designed and 3D-printed three NS gondolas in 2025. Follow the link to see the photo, and the page also has a link to his web site page where he fully describes what the entire project entailed.

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The Product Gallery section of this web site has had its refrigerator cars sub-category fully reviewed and updated. All known S-scale reefers are now listed, with all of the photos and information that we have been able to find. I want to thank Bob Hogan for not only providing a good number of photos, but also helping me to untangle the history of the various product lines, many of which changed hands over the years.

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By request of both designers and those wanting to print 3D models, a new feature has been added to the NASG web site to facilitate the sharing of .stl files. Please contact me at webmaster@nasg.org if you are willing the share your STL files. The link below will take you to the page. This new page is normally accessible via the "Product Gallery" section of the web site. There is a quick-link near the top of that page. Another link can be found farther near the bottom of the main Product Gallery page in a new sub-section called "3D-printer Files".

Update:
Robert Fuhst has offered his designs via the new .stl files that have been added.

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The public version of the January/February 2025 issue of the NASG's Dispatch is now available. Also, the members-only issue of the January/February 2026 Dispatch PDF can now be downloaded via the "Members Only" portal.

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The public version of the November/December 2024 issue of the NASG's Dispatch is now available. Also, the members-only issue of the November/December 2025 Dispatch PDF can now be downloaded via the "Members Only" portal.

Steve Monson provided a supplemental YouTube video of his logging train that is covered in this month's Dispatch.

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Based on the recent discussions related to Mattel's Hot Wheels 1:64 R/C cars, their known listing of model vehicles have been added to the Product Gallery (the old version).

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Dick Karnes provided a number of passenger car photos of his NYC 20th Century Limited train, which he built using the Union Station Products replacement car sides and American Models body cores.

Tom Roell provided additional photos of American Models Budd cars for the NYC and PRR. He also indicated that AM Budd coaches were released one in the 4-car set and two additional units (different car names) were available separately. This information has been integrated into the new Passenger Cars listing as well (learn something new every day!). Also, thanks to Tom's photos (he sent one of each side), I was able to correct the windows count on the AM Budd coach cars.

• Union Station Products NYC Cars
• American Models NYC Cars
• American Models PRR Cars

After five months of in-depth research, the Product Gallery's passenger cars section has been thoroughly reviewed, corrected, and updated. This research revealed that there were over 200 entries missing from the old listing. By request, passenger car sides have been added to this listing. That represents just under 1,300 entries that were added in the recent months and that were not found in the old listing at all. This provides us with well over 2,400 entries of passenger cars that are or were available or that can be built. Many photos have been added, and photos have been upgraded to a higher resolution where available. Many entries don't have photos, so if you have those, I'd be happy to add them. While doing this research, about a dozen cars were found that serve as railroad inspection/geometry cars, so those have been added to the "Maintenance-of-Way Cars" category of the Product Gallery, as those aren't used for transporting passengers.

Passenger cars are notoriously hard to correctly identify, unless you are a passenger-car expert. To aid in that, this update provides the car's type, its possible configuration, and its number of doors and windows (where those are visible in photos or diagrams). These are all tracked with each entry (where known). This allows you to more quickly identify which kind of car you have, or be able to find a matching model to a prototype photo or drawing that you might have. Note that the number of reports available for passenger cars is larger and somewhat different from the typical reports available for freight cars.

I am grateful to the handful of guys who answered my questions during this research project, as I am neither an expert in passenger cars nor in the ones produced in S over the years. This has been a crash-course in getting more familiar with them, though. I want to acknowledge Bob Hogan who contributed over 150 new photos of models he has built, which were integrated into this revised passenger car listing. Additionally, he graceously provided the instruction sheets for "The Supply Car" Budd passenger car kits, including detailed information about how to detail the underbody of those cars. Speaking of details, all entries have appropriate available detailing parts listed and linked that are currently available (S is blessed with many of them). Using supplemental information, data, and photos Bob provided, a new How-to article has been added to the web site that shows how he uses the replaceable sides to build passenger cars. There is enough information there for you to be able to undertake the construction of a lightweight passenger, if so desired, or you can commission Bob to build you a car.

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For those of you who were able to attend the 2025 NASG Convention, you had the opportunity to view Robbie Tonneberger's portable display layout. Robbie provided a couple of extra photos of his layout at the event, as well as provided a link to his web site that describes the layout.

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The public version of the September/October 2024 issue of the NASG's Dispatch is now available. Also, the members-only issue of the September/October 2025 Dispatch PDF can now be downloaded via the "Members Only" portal.

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Arthur Zinn has provided information about his layout, as well as a number of photos.

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The 2025 NASG Convention Summary page has been added and updated. All photos received as of today have been incorporated. Recent additions are:
- a photo of the Convention Car.
- Mystic Seaport tour photos.
- new supplemental photos of the Valley Railroad Company equipment.
- research data and links about the equipment at the Essex museum.
- excursion ride photos.
- photos of the Shoreline Trolley Museum portion of the tour.
If you have seen the page before, it is well worth browsing through it again with over 20 new photos added just today alone.

Start an e-mail message (webmaster@nasg.org).

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The following were updated or added:
Mike Cronin - added a photo of his AF-based switching layout.
Bob Davis - layout track scheme photo added.
Kim Hartshorn - layout data added.
Andy Malette - two videos added, covering the entire two-level layout, as of this year.
Bob McCarthy - John Degnan's older photos of the late Bob McCarthy's switching layout (the layout still exists under new ownership).
Fred Schlegel - many new photos added.
Hugh Sinn - added a video of his Reading Crusader running on his layout.

• Andy Malette
• Fred Schlegel
• Bob Davis
• Hugh Sinn
• Bob McCarthy
• Mike Cronin
• Kim Hartshorn

The names of the people who won the NASG's official Annual Awards at the 2025 NASG Convention has been made available.

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On July 13th, the United States Postal Service significantly increased their mailing costs. Because of that, we have had to slightly adjust our NASG Company Store prices.

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For those who enjoy history, a new page has been added to the "Site" section of this web site that covers the history of the NASG's web site itself. This is not a big deal, but nonetheless nice to have a record of it.

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The digital PDF file of the July/August 2025 Dispatch issue is now available on this web site via the "Members Only" portal. Also, the July/August 2024 Dispatch issue is now publicly available (its articles have also been indexed).

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