Railway Modeller

Published monthly by Peco Publications, Railway Modeller is a guide to creating railscapes of every era of train, from steam to electric, and caters for modellers of all abilities. Each issue features the best from the hobby for those modelling Britain's railways in all the popular scales and offers a unique blend of articles by experts and beginners alike, including a special section for newcomers wanting to learn all about the hobby and model making in general.

Model railway enthusiasts can now subscribe to the complete digital archive of leading magazine Railway Modeller , which stretches back to 1949 and encompasses more than 800 fully-searchable issues. The archive is organised into neat stacks of decades and years, which can be browsed across web, iOS and Android platforms for a flexible reading experience.

Every contents page is fully-linked to facilitate easy navigation to specific articles and features. The archive also benefits from the Exact Editions platform’s advanced search function, which allows readers to search for keywords across individual issues and the complete archive at the touch of a button.

In the May issue of Railway Modeller, we launch our RAIL200 Competition, celebrating this year's 200th anniversary of the opening of the Stockton & Darlington Railway – the first public passenger railway to use steam locomotives. With more than £2,000 worth of prizes to be won, the challenge is to build a small model layout or diorama on a baseboard of just 750mm x 305mm, with the option of constructing an OO gauge modular version that can be connected to other entries. For inspiration, the Plan of the Month feature suggests some potential track layouts for the given space, in several scales. 
Railway of the Month is Splott, a P4 scale layout set in a fictional Cardiff steelworks in the BR freight Sector era of the 1980s, while other layouts include Yorkshire Pennines, an N gauge modern main line and preserved railway which uses computer control to fully realise the potential of digital operation; Calf of Node, an OO9 folding layout small enough to be stored on a bookcase when not in use; and Tiverton, an EM gauge model of the former Exe Valley line hub. The latter is making its last exhibition appearance on 10 & 11 May at the expoEM show of the EM Gauge Society, whose 70th anniversary is marked with a feature in this issue.
Will Thompson shows how the Bachmann Class 117 Diesel Multiple Unit can be enhanced with some extra details or, with some (mostly) relatively minor modifications, converted into the similar Class 116 or 118 to provide a little more variety in your fleet. Callum Willcox builds the Parkside/Peco Midland Railway coach kit, and modifies it to represent a National Coal Board workers' train, while new products reviewed include the O gauge Austerity 0-6-0ST and OO gauge Class 88 electro-diesel from Dapol, the Great Eastern Railway J17 from OO Works, and new Great Western Railway wagons in OO from Rapido Trains UK.