Seacoast,
Would have missed the nice site except for mention on Coffee Always on Post: best yet!
WOW! Thank’s for sharing this, How awesome , I think it just goes to show how much can be accomplished with good planning & keeping things simple.
I spent my youth at the Apponnaug Color Shop ( Hobby Shop) in Warwick, Rhode Island. The guy who started it in 1950 my Dad got to know and than I started going there in the 1960’s-70’s before moving up to NH. I have not been there in years but I was checking the web a few years back and his son know runs the hobby shop (still going) and I emailed him to say hello. I stumbled up this huge Mr. Mike O Guage 1/32 slot car layout thats HUGE that a guy there built for a customer…
Yes I have seen it done about 30 years ago. The slot cars were HO but no one cared. Thye ran on their own tracks around a basement layout with a big mountain in the middle. Not to well done but the kids had fun. The layout was in a backyard neighbor of my Dads house and we could see into the basement glass sliding doors at Christmas time.
A word of caution, the kids will play with the slot cars rather than the trains. I have the same problem with my X-10 TV camera car when I have kids over. I hold it to the end of session to keep it from stealing the show.
Charlie
I found a 1/43 slot car set at Walgreens. I got it for my son for Christmas. It cost all of $9.99. I thought if it lasts through Christmas break it will be worth it. Actually I wondered if it was going to work at all for the price.
We set it up Christmas day and the set is really nice, but the contollers are junk. I am using a couple Bachmann starter set controllers to operate the cars.
But the cars and track are really nice quality. And they run really well using the Bachmann controllers.
Another nice thing is an oval of the slot car track fits right inside an oval of O-27 Lionel track.
The set is made by Artin. I looked on ebay and other cars are available. The two cars that came in my set are very generic modern sedans.
For $9.99, I think I will pick up another set. I think these could make an interesting city scene with having trains and cars running. No grade crossings but the trains could pass over the roadway on a bridge. Lots of possibilities.
This idea got into my head when I went to Target. There is an SCX 1:43 slot car set on sale for $40-50. No, it won’t cross the tracks, but it can go over or under the tracks with bridges and tresles. I just didn’t like the car selection, and with Christmas (at that time) looming in my “rearview”, I didn’t look to see if there were any other selections. I MAY have to look again at the F1 cars, but there will be no RICERs on my layout!!
Just a thought…
At these prices, particularly the $9.99 price point, it makes me wonder about changing the bodies from the set to something that you want. It would require some chopping and dicing, but if you mess up you haven’t lost much. You’d probably buy multiple sets anyway just to get more track.
Be VERY careful guys. We all know that slot cars were blamed for the decline in toy train popularity in the late fifties. PLEASE, think twice before you unleash that evil force again. [;)]
I have a couple of 1/32 Carrara sets, and some extra pieces. The cars available for this size are just supurb. The Carrara track can also accept 1/24 cars. It’s pretty big stuff and probably wouldn’t look right next to my trains. Also, I don’t know how slow you could continually make these things drive (compared to something like Kline streetscenes). I’m used to holding the throttle wide open, and eventually, I get a spinout or a car flying off the track. I wouldn’t want to damage any scenicking that I did for the train part of the layout.
You are right, slot cars are a different kind of fun, and would grab the attention of most people more than the trains, but if you are looking for anything you can find to keep your kids attention so you can spend some good quality time with them, then this might be a good solution.
Wes
Interesting topic… this Christmas my grandson got a Lionel NYC Freight set from me and a Carrera 1/43 slot car set from his uncle. We had the train set and the slot car setup together under the Christmas tree in the basement. He liked the train, but really liked the slot car set. We got both the Lionel set and the Carrera set at our local hobby store. Here is a link to one store on the internet that sells Carrera sets and separate items…
http://www.oakridgehobbies.com/slot_cars/carrera_pages/carrera_go_track.html
These Carrera (GO)1/43 cars really go fast, you cannot go around track with throttle full open or you leave the track. They also have a turbo button, we have not been able to use the turbo button because these cars go into orbit if you hit it. I have some pictures I will try to post later if I can get that feature to work. Did I mention that me and my 31 year old son also had a great time playing with this as well as my grandson. I had a Strombecker set when I was a kid and this Carrera seems to be as much fun. Hope this helps and a belated Merry Christmas to all.
I set up my older Carrara 1/32 set in a 6ft oval just to see how things looked. Things look ok with the 1/32 cars. The cars are around 5.5" inches long. The only problem is that I don’t think there is a way to set them to run around the track at one voltage. I can’t seem to hold the trigger at a voltage that the car goes around the track without slugging around the corners, or zooming in the straights. I think at a minimum, I would have to pull out all of the magnets inside the car to require less juice to move it, then I would probably need to chop off the plug on one of my extra controllers and mate it up to the output of a DC transformer from an HO or N guage set. That might work. There are 3 prongs on the controller, so I will need to investigate to see what that third one is for. All in all, since I own the sets already, they look ok. the 1/43 would look better. I don’t know if you can get them to creep along the track, but they look OK sitting there.
Wes
Might be slightly off topic, but what about K-Line SuperStreets? These cars are (I think) full O scale, in fact they run on “streets” that are actually O scale track, and they’re made by Lionel. I thought this would probably be the way to go for me, if I ever had operating city streets, which I think I may someday. I think having operating cars with the trains makes things look much cooler. You could also still have some side streets where you have other stationary vehicles. Not everything has to be in motion, but I think a good portion of it should be.
Great topic. We saw a demonstration SCX digital set up (1:32) at FAO Swartz in Chicago Macys last weekend and the kids and I were blown away. Have not thought much about slot cars since I was a kid. I am now considering building a slot car layout under my train layout. With lots of planning and space, I think it would be fun to have a 1:43 Artin race track on a layout landscaped nicely.
Superstreets is still the way I plan to go. Just for the fact that it’s more to scale and you can run trolley’s on it. I don’t have enough room to make a real raceworthly track, and I have seen cars fly off and hit stuff constantly with the wrong driver, so real racetrack isn’t ideal. I had a bunch of Carrara track in storage and thought I would try it. Superstreets finally was delivered to my LHS right before Christmas. That’s probably where the next $100 goes…
Wes
I set up my first set of Superstreets and I am very pleased. Love the tight turns weaving through my emerging city.
seacoast, I have H.O. race cars and know of two places in West Palm Beach FL that handle H.O. race cars, both cars and track. They are not dead, just overlooked alot of times, also new company is making the old Aurora style cars called Johnny Lightning, and a another new company bought out the rights for Model Motoring a.k.a. the old track style of Aurora H.O. race cars. Also one other company is making H.O. race cars, Life Like.
pbjwilson, I like your idea about using race cars from Walgreens for your layout, I did not think about that. Might be too late for this layout as I am very crowded for space right now. You might be able to buy a two train transformer in H.O. to control your race cars if they are D.C.
A quick note about Super Streets, I can run Lionel passenger cars # 6-15104(Reading company) & 6-7012(New York Central) on the small size curves, locomotive was the Plymouth switcher. Play around with Super Streets and your rolling stock and you may be surprized at what goes through the Super Street curves.
Lee F.
I’ve been looking into this. They make a 1/43 scale slot car, pretty close in size and readily available. I’m also using Lego’s for my buildings and people.[:)]
Many years ago, back in the 60’s, Ideal Toy Co. made a line of slot cars called Motorific. These cars were 1:48 scale. You can find a few still on ebay. Since these cars and trucks were battery operated they wouldn’t require special track. If you were handy with power tools you could cut grooves for the slot pins in the roadways of your layout with a power router.
Wow I started this thread 10+ years ago.
Which is not surprising since this idea has been around for 30+ years. Those of us who are old enought to remember the early days of slot car racing (those devil machines that alledgedly “killed” model railroading) know that rail crossing accessories were available practically from day 1 in all MRR scales.
In fact SuperStreets is nothing new. There was a European manufacturer (Faller I think) offering a system like it in the 1970s in HO and N. Instead of electricity it used track sections with a kind of mini garage-door opener chain thingy embedded in it, that pulled the vehicles along at a realistic speed. You could use just about any of the manufacturer’s vehicles on it by simply attaching a clip device to the undercarriage of the car or truck.
The problem is as it always was, that slot cars are/were sold as racing sets. The cars are geared for speed. And it’s not very prototypical to have Ferarries and Formula One racers speeding through the middle of your rural community. That is why the SuperStreets idea works better for our application.