I spent an enjoyable 110 minutes on Saturday watching the DVD "Circus Train Adventure' From High End Video Productions in Maui,Hawaii. This program produced and mostly filmed by Layne Venardos is of intrest, Layne's son Kevin was untill reciently the Ringmaster for the RB Blue Unit and Layne got to take many trips around the country on the train (Blue Unit) which he filmed and narated from the vestibule of the car his son occupied with his small dog Nestor. There are also many views of loading and unloading,run by's taken at verious locations by other fanzees. Here then is my conclusion about modeling either one of the RB trains with Micro Trains cars. The protype Red & Blue Unit trains (not the smaller Gold Unit which moves by truck) are 58 cars long. Ome would need a club layout the size of Belmont or larger to run the "Silver Snail"as the preformers effectionately call the real trains. A good compromise in N Scale to get that long snakey look would be atleast 30 cars. MT has modeled some of the cars so far ,but not all hopefully they will do more. Their latest 6 car runner pack is quite nice. 90% of the cars the preformers travel in ride on four wheel trucks, MT should switch to these for their sleeper cars. The head end cars as I call them (former baggage cars) mostly ride on six wheel trucks. The consists appear to vary at times in position of cars,but to too much. There is always a power generator car at the front and one between the livestock cars and preformers cars. The flat cars are behind these and the converted Auto Rack car sometimes is the very last car on the train, sometimes behind the preformers cars. To model the train correctly in my opinion you will need two generator cars, MT has done one so far,and four livestock cars. Atleast 10 passenger cars would be nice. MT should take a Con Cor Diner and decorate it to represent the coach converted into a "Pie Car",the duplex sleeper could have a thin strip of plastic covering the upper level windows. This would then give the car the look of some of the converted cars that have large blank areas between the windows.MT should also Use one of the Con Cor Budd coaches ,not the twin window one to represent the Budd cars found in the train. There are a huge variety of different loads on each flat car,I really like the wagons that have red & yellow striped canvas tops, also there are some pickup trucks with trailers (wagons) behind on some of the flats. The Atlas FORD pickup truck with a wagon could be used as a load. In conclusion,the MT train offers a good start so far, but you will have to collect (buy) an awful lot of sets and single cars to to a decient modeling job.Nate Goodman (Nato). Salt Lake, Utah.
