Introduction

Hi!

I'm Andy Reichert and my much delayed hobby has always been a dynamic mixture of computer electronics design and working model railroads, especially those that model real electric railroad prototypes. As often happens in life, one of my youthful hobbies became my adult calling, and I ended up in many of the pioneering areas of various aspects of the Micro-Computing and Networking Revolutions. This of course left only model railroads as my relaxation hobby, but also took most of my relaxation time away.


It's a long story, which I will not go into deeply here, but in my building of various test layouts, I developed a considerable frustration with the by now very crude (from an engineering perspective) 1950's  underpinnings of most RTR mechanisms, wheels and the track they ran upon. This led me to become an early member of the fledgling Proto:87 SIG, and to offer to become its volunteer storekeeper.

It soon became apparent, that there wasn't yet much to put in such a stores, so I found myself in the position of puzzling how to make some of the missing items, and for a price that everyone could afford. Of course one fantasized of somehow instead persuading RTR manufacturers to magically change over to a set of much finer standards. However, finer standards bring their own limitations, and it is not generally possible to have a finer standard system that can duplicate the sharp curves and rough handling that most RTR systems are not only capable of, but actually intended for.

There had to be another way . . . ..