At TrainPlayer, we want to enhance the enjoyment you get from operating your own equipment on designs of your choosing. With that in mind, we will provide some step by step clinics on a variety of topics to assist you in adding your own personal touches to your layouts.

Current Clinic Topics

• Paint Your Own Cars. In this clinic, we will show you how to develop and paint your own car collection for your “home” layout – all without worrying about paint fumes or messes.

• Create your own bitmap images shows you how easy it is to make some structures that are close to or located around your home rails. By using MS Paint or a similar image creation program, you can custom design your choice of passenger terminal, warehouses, factories and other industries. Add your new structures to your collections with a simple click and drag to the appropriate Scenery folders.

• How to Build a Roundhouse - Mark Johnson is one of our gifted contributors and he has provided a couple of kits that can be used to add some high definition images to your layout.  The roundhouse kit is already included on the Web Scenery chooser in the "stations_rr buildings" folder. This clinic provides assistance in expanding a basic roundhouse.

• How to Fill in an Irregular Shape in your scenery design - this is a topic that has come up several times.  In this clinic we describe the steps you need to take to accomplish this task.

• How to Create your own Photo Composites - several users have asked how they can use some existing satellite imagery programs to creat their own photo composites for use with TrainPlayer.  Bruno Pigozzo provides an overview on the tools and skills needed.

• How To Apply Track to your Photo Composite - this lesson will show you the tools and tips to turn your new photo composite into a working layout in TrainPlayer

• How To Change your Default Cars to Your Home Railroad cars - this clinic walks you through the steps in Windows Explorer on replacing the currrent Default folder with new images that represent your favorite or home railroad. Afterwards, every layout that you open will have your favorite cars already on it!!

• How to Create a Custom Trestle Bridge - In this Clinic, we will show you how to use the beautiful art work of Mark Johnson's Wood and Steel Trestle bridges to create a custom length to span any river on your layout.

• How to Name Your Trains - In this Clinic, we will show you how to name all of the trains on your layouts. You can even name cuts of cars if you want. This feature gives more character to "operating" trains on your layouts.

• How to Conduct Freight Operations - Our Chief Operations Officer, Peter Prunka, explains the ins and outs of shuffling rail cars around with his handy illustrated OPS session.

We know we have some considerable expertise in our user community and welcome any submission for these topics.

If you want to share your experience or if there are specific topics you would like to see included, please drop us a line at support@trainplayer.com