This page highlights changes made to this web site.
Because of the fact that Yahoo! Groups no longer allows storing of photos and files, Don has provided the photos that used to be stored in the "showcaseline" discussion group.
The figures portion of the "S Product Gallery" had the categories to which some figures were assigned updated. Also changed the way the "by category" report looks, in that the second page lists all the figures belonging to a particular category, individually and sorted by name. That will provide a complete overview of the figure by thumbnail photo. If you are interested in a particular figure, click on that thumbnail to see its larger photo, and further details.
Bill Winans provides missing Plasticville Tower photos.
Over the years, the Structures division of the S Product Gallery section of this web site has grown steadily. We now have well over 1,400 entries. Some of the by-category pages were getting to be quite long, so they have been split up over many more-detailed categories. This should help you to find the particular structures you are interested in.
The public version of the November/December 2018 issue of the NASG's Dispatch is now available (includes the magazine article index on this web site). Also, the November/December 2019 Dispatch PDF can now be viewed or downloaded via the "Members Only" section.
The currently available inventory of the 2017 NASG Convention cars are now listed on the recently created "Small Manufacturers" page.
If you are a small manufacturer (or you happen to know of one) who provides products directly aiding the S-scale modeler (whether AF, scale, or narrow-gauge), please contact the NASG webmaster to have your products listed in this new section of the NASG web site.
The NASG is about connecting manufacturers and modelers. If you have the funds, or are a larger or more established company, you will likely already have a dedicated web site for your products. However, for the small manufacturer the costs of advertising and/or creating your own web site may be greater than any profits realized. Let's face it, a vast majority of manufacturers of model railroad products, regardless of scale, are mom-and-pop type of operations. So, this new section of the NASG web site is now available to help bridge the gap.
A new page was added to the "Extra Board" button, which provides information about what type of content we are looking for, to make this web site even better.
Don Thompson has provided some detailed information about the former S-Helper Service products. With the effective shut-down of the Yahoo! Groups discussion lists, the one that Don runs for providing product support for the SHS product line, will be phased out. Don and yours truly (NASG webmaster) will be working together to continue to capture product info to persist on the NASG web site. In this update, Don provides some general "Q&A" answers, information on how to insulate a section of track coming off of their #3 turnout, and information about the 2-8-0 gear replacement. Don has also made available CAD drawings (low-rez screen captures) of their scale wheels, axles, and wheelsets. SHS used to provide those to any manufacturer interested in making S-scale equipment.
When you click on one of the buttons on the left or right side of this web site, a menu of options appears. As of today, when you hover your computer's cursor over any of those menu options for about one second, a small pop-up window appears that indicates the date of when that section of the web site was last updated.
Don Thompson provided a number of S-Helper Service diesel locomotive sound decoder installation documents, which may be of use to those who work on those engines.
The menu options when you press the "News" button have been changed. This was because some of those pages have become too long. The following have been changed:
1. "New S Products" and "Ongoing S Projects" have been merged.
2. The above two were then split up into product category pages (see the "S-scale..." menu options of the "News" button).
3. "General News" and "Saying our Farewell" have been merged into the new "Our Community".
4. The format of the individual pages has been altered slightly:
a) instead of many smaller photos, an entry now has larger photos.
b) descriptive text flows around the image, where applicable.
c) entries are sorted by date and title (as before) and then by descriptive name (this is new).
The objective of this redesign was to make the pages smaller, and to help you more quickly find the new products in which you are interested. The old design was implemented thinking that there weren't going to be too many updates, but we actually have quite a bit of S-scale news.
We have a new "News" section on the NASG web site, called "For Sale!". Click on the "News" button, and then click on "For Sale!". It is still a work-in-progress, but we have a few items listed there to begin with.
Chris Rooney has provided for us a scan of the S Scale Locomotive & Supply third edition "Blue Book" catalog. He also provided the accompanying Parts Installation booklet, and the Instruction Sheet for that company's 2-8-2 locomotive kit.
Lance McCold contributes instruction sheets for two of the PRS kits. Handy if you bought your kit second-hand and the instruction sheets are missing.
The public version of the September/October 2018 issue of the NASG's Dispatch is now available (includes the magazine article index on this web site). Also, the September/October 2019 Dispatch PDF can now be viewed or downloaded via the "Members Only" section.
Don Thompson sent the definitive listing of all the passenger cars that S-Helper Service released during their collaboration with American Models. These have now been corrected and updated in this web site's S Product Gallery.
With the publication of the August issue of the S Scale Resource, in which the webmaster wrote a review of currently-available S-scale figures, a new section has been added to the S Product Gallery. We now have a complete listing of all S-scale figures ever produced. Follow the link, or click on "S Product Gallery" and then click on the "Figures" menu options. A couple of manufacturers were discovered since the writing of that article, and several new figures are available from manufacturers listed in the article. These will be added in the near future.
Since Lionel includes all of their products in their twice-per-year catalog, they have provided us with a PDF file that just lists the S-scale products only. They have given us permission to post it on this web site. See the Catalogs section of the web page link shown.
In 1998 banta modelworks bought Buildings & Structure's product line. Then in 2014 they sold it to Commercial Scale Models, who revived the "Buildings & Structures" name again. However, in 2019 that company disappeared, so banta modelworks once again took over the Building & Structures product line. Because of this confusion, and just in case it gets sold again, the duplicate structures entries between these two company names have been removed from the banta modelworks company listing.
The public version of the July/August 2018 issue of the NASG's Dispatch is now available (includes the magazine article index on this web site). Also, the July/August 2019 Dispatch PDF can now be viewed or downloaded via the "Members Only" section.
Mark Klemens shares a video of his locomotive stretching its legs on a friend's very-nicely-done layout.
Since the Product Notes section of pages has been growing and because it is directly related to locomotives and cars, access to the page has been moved from the "Modeling Notes" page of the "Extra Board" button to "S Product Gallery" button's menu. This provides quicker access and is close to the other content to which it applies.
The Product Gallery's "Vehicles by Prototype Manufacturer" section has been improved. Some brands, such as Ford, Chevrolet, etc. now have so many entries that their previous reports showed hundreds of entries on a single page. This made the pages overwhelming. So, an extra intermediate level has been added to the report, which is where you select the model that you want to see. So, if you select Ford, for example, you can now select F-150, F-250, etc. The final pages will have the models listed in the order of their prototype year (if that info is known).
Thanks to the efforts by the Southeastern Michigan S Gaugers club, the NASG can now offer for sale the Modern-era clearance gauge. This era covers from 1983 to the present. If you model the Classic era, we have a gauge for that as well.
The public version of the May/June 2018 issue of the NASG's Dispatch is now available (includes the magazine article index on this web site). Also, the members-only issue of the May/June 2019 Dispatch PDF can now be viewed or downloaded via the "Members Only" section.
A large number of "specialty" cars and locomotives were moved to the regular S Product Gallery listings, because people were having a hard time finding them, because they didn't look there. So, now only the ones that are truly unique are listed in the "Specialty Cars & Engines" section.
Up until now, the home page photo that was the oldest was replaced with a new photo each weekend. From now on, the newest photo is added as the first photo, while all the others are pushed further down. The oldest, i.e. the last, photo will be removed when the new one is added. Also, the names of the image files will be changed, so that if your web browser caches the files, it will be forced to get the new one each weekend.
S-scale models of boats and ships were included in the "Structures" section of the S Product Gallery. This was done, initially, because we only had two or three to list. However, over time more have come to our awareness, so it is time to separate that group from building structures, and have their own page. We still only have a handful of them, so a one-page report is sufficient for now.
Looking at the site map of this web site, it now shows exactly 10,000 photos on this web site. Wow! Thank you all for contributing!
Scanned-in instruction sheets for the Kinsman express reefer kit are now available on this web site.
As more and more people contribute to the Products Notes ("Extra Board", "Modeling Notes", "Product Notes"), it has become clear that a more formal link between the S Product Gallery pages and the Product Notes pages (if available for a particular item) is needed.
So, if an item has content in the Product Notes section of the web site, there is now a "Modeling Notes" link shown in the description pages of the item in the S Product Gallery.
We've had an "Online Article" link in the item description for a while, but for some items there are two pages found, so the entry has been renamed to "Model Online Article" and a second one is now possible, too.
Another new link to an external web site has been added to the item description (where applicable), which is called "Prototype Link". As a matter of fact, there are two of them available, where needed. So, if there is a prototype article, video, or web site available matching the model, then a link will be provided.
Note that these are only applicable to the Locomotives and Cars sections of the S Product Gallery.
Since about 8% of male Caucasians suffer from color-blindness, the color of this web site's links has been changed. The previous use of dark green was too close to the regular black text, so colorblind people couldn't readily detect which texts were links to other pages. The new color is red.
When you used to hover over a link, its color changed from green to red. What happens now is only the underline appears. Note that links have always been bold, to help distinguish them from regular text.
Also, going forward, the web site will see minor changes here and there by separating out the links from the regular text. The NASG Dispatch page is a recent example of this, where the links now appear separate from, rather than embedded within, the paragraph of text.
The public version of the March/April 2018 issue of the NASG's Dispatch is now available (includes the magazine article index on this web site). Also, the members-only issue of the March/April 2019 Dispatch PDF can now be viewed or downloaded via the "Members Only" section.
The web site's main "NASG" button's menu was updated to better group related topics together, and the bottom section was sorted alphabetically.
The pages were re-formatted (behind-the-scenes were set up to be easier to maintain), and added the instruction sheets Ken Garber provided for the Amity Star Models bulkhead flat car kit.
Paul's photos have been on the home page rotation until today, so the photos were placed on a more permanent page on this web site, for all to enjoy.
The "by Manufacturer & ID" report has been re-formatted. The data is the same as before, but the report is more oriented toward the manufacturer's product ID, which is what was intended for this report all along. So, the first page of the report shows the listing of manufacturers, as before. When you click on one of those, a page appears with a listing of all of the manufacturer's product IDs. When you click the "View Entry" link to the right of a particular ID, you will see the product info page (same as before). This makes it very easy to find a particular product ID, if that is what you are looking for. Note that only products for which we have a known product ID are listed in this report. If you want to see all of the entries a manufacturer has produced, look at the "by Manufacturer & Type" report instead.
(The same as the above news item, except for the link takes you to the locomotives report section.)
Ted has been collecting signs, and decided to share photos of them on the NASG web site.
There were a number of cars and engines that were categorized as "Baltimore & Ohio" and "Chesapeak & Ohio", but whose paint schemes were actually part of the Chessie System. The new road names "Chessie System (B&O)" and "Chessie System (C&O)" have been added, and those items that were mislabeled have been so updated. Also "Chessie System (WM)" was added.
Pieter Roos contributes an article and photos of how he built his horizontal-rib Erie hopper.
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