I just shoot and edit the videos; but here's my take on it: The layout was designed for reliable operation of long trains. It was built by experienced modelers. Rolling stock must meet rigorous standards. The CMRM volunteers assembling and operating these trains have a lot experience and skill with these kinds of operations.

Hello, to answer some of your questions how we managed to get all of the cars not to wobble is to weight them down to NMRA Specs. The Locomotives are cleaned as well as the track every time we run an operation on the layout the reason why 283 wont string line is because the locomotives are spread out though out the train and the speeds on all of the locomotives are the same and tractive effort as well. When you have any train you wanna try to maintain the same speed so little things wont happen like derailments ect.. the museum does have its own car department to make sure that all of their equipment runs good and meets the specs but in this case this is a privately owned and operated train so were in charge of making sure that this train meets and exceeds the NMRA and the museum standards. Our locomotives do not have traction tire rings its just metal on metal I hope that helps and answers some of your questions. anymore questions please fell free to leave more comments thank you for the interest.

@@lbrendse Thank you very much. I went back to see this awesome video and saw your reply in the comments section. Very educating. While you folks are hobbyists, I put you in the category of "Professional Hobbyists": you're that good.

That's a very good question. So I went to Google and typed in "time to load coal train". Some of the links I got: cs.trains.com/trn/f/111/p/56059/705387.aspx www.trainorders.com/discussion/read.php?1,57207 cs.trains.com/trn/f/111/p/147095/1631231.aspx A lot of interesting (at least in my opinion) answers.

They are not my locomotives, so I don't have that information. Sorry.

Thank you, anyway!

cmas brg Hi. These locomotive LEDs are all done by big al Mayo. I believe there SMD 402 603 led I forget off the top of my head.

Oops! Fixed. Glad to know somebody reads those descriptions. :-).

Not my unit. I only did the video, so I don't have the answer.

If I had to guess, I would say it was programmed to do that with the CV value on the decoder.

@@waynecunningham3470 I understand that it is programmed, it is just not easy to do, most of the time it will work until you move forward, unless it is a scaletrains locomotive which work perfectly in DPU service with the light facing rearward on dim. I have discussed this with tsunami and no real results with keeping light on. I will just stick to scaletrains with loksound for dpu service.

Wayne Cunningham All I do is program the decoder on JMRI and it does take a little bit of getting use too but once you get the hang of it it’s pretty simple

@@lbrendse Thank you, i have that program but never used to make my consist, i will try it, Thanks again

While many of the trains that are run at special CMRM events such as "Extreme Trains" are contemporary, the layout itself and the museum owned trains are set in the 1970s. In this period freight train graffiti was not widespread and would not be prototypical.

@@billr991 Long about the time cabooses started disappearing?

@@oaktadopbok665 Cabooses went away in the 1980s. See en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caboose for and interesting article about this.

There are large number of critters on the layout - both domesticated and wild. They just don't make an obvious appearance in many of the videos.