Affiliate Disclosure

ModelRailCalc is a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a means for sites to earn advertising fees by advertising and linking to Amazon.com. As an Amazon Associate we earn from qualifying purchases.

In plain terms: if you click a product link on this site and buy something, we may receive a small commission. It costs you nothing extra. The price you pay is the same whether you use our link or go to Amazon directly.

What this does not change

It does not change which products we recommend, and it does not change what we say about them. The clearest evidence of that is how often this site tells you to spend less:

• The expert tier on every roundup names who should not buy it.
• The layout builds each carry a "what you can skip" section, and they talk you out of sound on every locomotive, a turntable on a plan with nowhere for it, and a booster larger than the layout needs.
• We recommend a decoder without sound at roughly a third of the price of one with sound, because sound on every locomotive is noise rather than an improvement.
• We say plainly that DC is not obsolete for a single-operator layout, which is the cheaper answer rather than the more profitable one.

A recommendation that exists because of the commission rather than because of the reader is worthless to both of us, since this site's only real asset is being right.

How product information gets here

Every product we link comes from the Amazon Creators API with its ASIN verified live, and the returned title read against the product the page claims it is. Names, prices and images come straight from that response rather than being typed by hand, which is why a price here matches the listing.

We never invent an ASIN, a price, a photograph or a specification. Where a product has no live price we show "See price" rather than guessing, and a build total simply does not count it. Where a product is not sold on Amazon at all, it is named in prose and linked to a scoped search rather than given a false product link.

Prices and availability change constantly. Every price on this site is the listed price at the time the page was compiled and should be treated as a planning figure, not a quote.

We do not test products

There is no workshop here with a test track. Recommendations are researched from manufacturer specification sheets, instruction manuals, published NMRA standards and recommended practices, and the recurring themes in verified owner reviews. We never write that we tested something, because we have not. More on this on the methodology page.

Other relationships

If we ever publish sponsored or paid content, it will be labelled as such on the page itself, and it will be kept separate from editorial recommendations. We do not accept payment for placement in a roundup tier, and we do not remove honest criticism of a product in exchange for anything. See the partner page for what we will and will not do.

Questions

If anything about how this site earns money is unclear, or you think a recommendation reads as though it were bought, tell us. That is a fair thing to ask and we would rather answer it.