It's snowing here this morning at my house...
Which makes this the perfect day for playing with model trains.
And something new has arrived from Trainworld.com!
Let's get this open so I can show it to you.
You've probably seen in some of my previous videos featuring Thomas & Friends trains...
That I only have a few rail cars...
For my Thomas & Friends locomotives to pull around my layouts.
So, with the help of my patrons...
Who support me by making donations of as little as $1 a month...
I bought a few more.
Now these red passenger cars...
Which I think will look perfect getting pulled behind James, The Red Engine...
Have come without any lettering on them.
Which is fine by me...
Because my wife has an awesome craft room...
And she was easily able to make me some lettering...
To turn these plain looking red passenger cars...
In to custom-crafted Jim Zim railway cars.
I've set up a little layout in my living room.
So, let's get these trains running, and have some fun!
We'll start with James...
And his new red Jim Zim passenger cars.
Plus, he's also pulling Annie and Clarabel...
The two orange passenger cars I've had all along.
And now let's get Emily going...
Pulling two of the new cars that just arrived...
As well as three others I already had.
And, of course, we've got to have Thomas on the layout!
He's pulling a new gondola car and a new box car...
Plus, three gondola cars I've had for quite a while.
Now I'm running them all fairly slow to start out...
And later on in the video, we'll get them all running at full speed.
What's cool about running them at this speed...
Is the sounds they make...
Especially that clickety-clack...
As the wheels cross over from one section of track to the next.
I'm using three different cameras to shoot this.
Let's call this camera #1...
Which has a view of the trains running through the carpeted section of my living room...
The camera I'm using here is my big Canon DSLR camera.
And this is camera #2...
With a view of the trains when they're running on the wood floor...
Behind this section of the sofa.
The camera I'm using here is a GoPro.
And here's another GoPro, camera #3...
With a view of the tracks just before they go up on the carpet again.
I've just kind of randomly set the speeds for each of the trains.
And I think I set James and Emily's speeds about the same as each other.
But it looks like I set Thomas' speed a little higher than the other two.
You can see Thomas, who was the last to get started...
Has already passed Emily.
Oh, wow! Look at that!
Thomas has caught up with James now.
And look at Emily... she's so graceful in the way she moves down the track.
Oh, my! Thomas has opened up a big lead now!
He's gone from last place to first place...
In just three laps around the layout!
I was trying to set his speed to be the same as the others, but...
I guess I was way off when I dialed his in.
We've got pretty good spacing between all three trains now.
There's Thomas...
There's James...
And there's Emily.
Switching to camera #3...
We can see the parade once again.
Thomas and his freight cars.
James with the passenger cars.
And then there's Emily with her freight cars.
This camera has a really interesting view!
You can see all the way over to the other side of the layout...
I think what I'm going to do for fun here...
Is to speed the video up to about four times normal speed...
That's going to make Thomas' speed difference much more obvious.
With each trip around the layout Thomas is going to get...
A little closer to catching James and Emily.
Watch!
Yeah, there we go.
He's caught up to the pack now.
Give him another lap or two, and he'll be out ahead of them!
That's kind of fun to watch it sped up like that!
Well, stick with me here.
Instead of speeding the video up...
I'm just going to run all three trains at their very top speed...
Right after this...
OK, let's run the trains again.
This time with each one set at full speed.
And to mix things up a bit...
I've added a fourth camera...
And we'll set the whole race to music.
It's been fun playing with model trains again today here at my house.
And in the time it took me to shoot this video...
It warmed up just enough outside...
For the snow to turn to rain.
I want to give a big shout-out to my patrons...
Whose small monthly donations all added up...
Making it possible for me to get these new rail cars you saw on the layout today.
Go to Patreon.com/JimZim
To find out how you can help, for as little as $1 a month.
And patrons that contribute at least $4 a month...
Get early access to my videos.
They were able to see this video about ten days before it went public on YouTube.
Thanks for watching today!
Click the thumbs up button if you liked the video.
I'm Jim Zim. Subscribe to my channel if you want to see more videos like this.