Practical Garden Railways Book

I actually bought this book by mistake. I was looking at three different books in the hobby shop, and kept changing my mind which one was of more interest, and I confused myself, thinking this one was one of the others. The book is perfectly suitable for extreme beginners, but I wanted something a little more in depth. It's basically a collection of about twenty 2-page articles from the 1997-1998 issues of Model Railroader magazine, aimed at beginners in the hobby. The articles are not bad, but none of them give you enough information about the topic under discussion to be going on with. They basically just introduce you to things like what "hardshell" is. One could not possibly make hardshell successfully just from reading this book. At the end of each article they recommend one or two complete books about the subject, almost always by the publisher of this book. It seems more like a series of ads for the in-depth books than anything else. I only recommend this for real beginners, and only to help you learn the terminology and what things mean. Actual techniques cannot be learned from this book.