I really enjoy all of the AMS discussions and how it all blends nicely with the Marklin products, which brings me to ask the relevant question - "Where does one start"? Is it best to start by buying a complete set first or piece meal? Since I am in the USA, I have tons of opportunity to purchase Aurora Slot car stuff, but to me, it doesn't look as good as the AMS. If anyone has any thoughts on the best way to begin, I would really appreciate it!

Hi Robyn, good question.

Probably Ebay is really your first port of call. Availability in the US can sometimes be dearth or deluge. If you are comfortable dealing off-shore, then ebay.de would be a good place to start, your ebay.com logon will work on other ebay sites, and for the translation, well personally, I use the Google 'Chrome' browser by default, initially because I liked its built-in automatic translation facility, but it's also a lot faster than IE and now I use IE only on a few instances.

Any items that the seller has indicated he will ship overseas can also be viewed via ebay.com, and all you need to do it change the 'de' portion of the url, to 'com'. If it says the page cannot be displayed then the seller has not selected to send to other countries. The advantage of viewing the item on your home ebay site is that it's easier to navigate for asking questions etc.

Many Europeans are actually quite happy to ship overseas, even as far away as New Zealand, provided you ask first.

But before you do anything, I would strongly suggest you do plenty of searching to establish exactly what you want to buy, especially if you are on a tight budget. If you're lucky and have a money tree then of course you can buy a little more freely and learn from that knowing that whatever ends up surplus you can always relist.

There are a few traps it would be best to avoid, one is not buying cars with a racing chassis to use on your railway, they are simply too fast and you cannot run them slowly with any degree of reliable control and IMHO they just look silly tearing around flat-out, unless you make an actual race track part of your layout.

Vehicles with the so-called 'Zinc-chassis' are best, these run sooo smoothly due to the excellant reductive gearing and they are also heavier so less prone to derailment (de-slotting actually).

If you purchase a Road-Rail set 4005 or 405 you'll most likely get a car with a zinc-chassis anyway, probably a Ford Capri, but don't be too concerned if you don't like that particular auto, most bodies are interchangeable.

If you can wait, and just want to have track integrated, then the only specific thing to obtain is one or more railway/ams crossing sections.

There is the fully automatic (Link) crossing B-176 / 4722...

and two (Link) individual crossing sections to give you this capability.

As for Aurora, I'm not so familiar with their items, and some Aurora items are made by Faller anyway, a good example being the N-Bus, known in Aurora as their "Postage Stamp" series. The general consensus is that the agreement between Faller & Aurora was not to poach on each others 'turf', in exchange for trade co-operation. As far as I know, only Faller, and possibly Tyco Trucking made vehicles capable of sustained slower 'traffic' speeds but I stand to be corrected.

There is a little to learn, but you're in the right place to ask.

Good luck

Steve

Edited by user 13 January 2013 18:26:35(UTC)  | Reason: Added links to item information

Hi Steve and Marco,

Thanks for the advice.

Ian.

Thank you so much for the information!

I browsed ebay today and saw a lot of cars for auction. Steve indicated that the Zinkchassis are really good because of slow speeds. I did not find any information as to the type of motor other than flachanker. Is there a site that has photos of the different motors and chassis? ( or on the links mentioned above)?

Ah, just checked, one listed here at the moment. This is the closest you'll get to a 'Koll's for Faller AMS'.

Incidentally, many years ago I obtained permission from the original author to use sections of the book for my own (English) project "The A-M-S Companion", designed to be a side-by-side English reference (so long as I did not simply 'copy' it). Originally I was going to produce it on a CD and I spent years accumulating and scanning material in as many languages as I could find but since then, a lot more information has been available on the Internet than was available at the time I started and my enthusiasm kind of waned. I still think there's a place for my project because my focus is a little different where I want to dig into Technical subjects and details as well as giving a general overview of each item.

Some years ago, (1995) the original manuscript, photos etc was sold on EBay, It included much additional information and there was speculation the buyer might do a reprint, but sadly, ain't seen it yet. Surprising because it sold for something like 400 Euro's!!

The first edition (the one listed) was published Feb. 1990. I have edition 2 published April 1995. Edition 3 is a long time coming.

Hi Steve

I don´t think you will get it for about 40 €uros nowadays. The last years the price have increased to around 100 €uros! A new edition wouldn´t be bad since there obviously is a big demand of this book.

/Mats