Starting up again - new home, second layout, Dead Rail experiment

It's been a while since I posted an entry, quite a while.  Once we decided in January 2014 that we would move this year, all work on the layout effectively ended.  Now we're in a new home in the model railroad mecca of Beamsville, ON (no, really, we have a fantastic hobby shop in town and some of the best modellers around), and work has resumed.

When we left our home, I had installed all the modules in our family room on a metal shelf bracket system and laid the track through most of Elmira.  A lighting valance hiding T5 fluorescent bulbs was also installed.  It looked very promising, as shown in this in-progress view:

However, I ran into problems with the trackwork, primarily related to the rail popping off the CV ties strips.  We'll get into that issue in another post.

We moved into a home with an unfinished basement, so naturally I was paralyzed again reconsidering how to best adapt the track plan to my new space, even my choice of prototype was up for grabs.  Over the summer I did make a set of three very lightweight modules to build a scale model of CN's Pine Street spur following an inspiration in Trevor Marshall's Achievable Layouts blog (http://themodelrailwayshow.com/LayoutDesign/?p=2070).  Three turnouts in 12 ft and I could model the mill complex in exact scale length.

I'm still undecided on whether to complete that concept, but with a Tam Valley DRS receiver and transmitter expected any day now, I can always lay the track down held together only with rail joiners and a few tacks, and operate and experiment to my heart's content.  I may still build this as something to take to shows, as Trevor suggested, if only to demonstrate the battery operation to the masses.

For now I'm putting up the drywall in the first basement room to be finished.  Nominally it will be a guest room, but practically speaking it will become the home of Elmira, ON on the CNR ca. 1988.  As it should be.  Questions abound as to layout height (I'm thinking high, i.e. 60"), room & layout lighting (LED strip vs. T5), duckunders, how much to intrude into the room space (i.e. along three walls or go for all four) and the aforementioned question of reliable track laying.  And I suppose also of whether to wire the layout for conventional DCC operation.  All things to be considered in due time.  If you have any thoughts and experiences to share regarding the above, I'd love to hear about and discuss them with you.

ttfn

Why I chose to model what I model, part deux

I believe it didn't take very long after I decided in my early teens that model railroading would be my hobby for me to start planning a dream layout.  You know, the one that would fill my parents' basement and then some, requiring an addition to the house (not to mention a Lotto 6/49 win).  I've been carrying that dream around from country to country, house to house, for 30 years.  Have I built that dream layout?  Of course not.

Reality in the form of a fairly nomadic professional existence, a wife and four children, and the lack of free time that all of that entails, has limited me to starting several roughly 5'x9' layouts.  Two ovals of track so that my sons wouldn't necessarily crash into each other all the time, and a chance to practice building benchwork, laying track, and wiring up a DCC system.  Good experience to gather, but nowhere close to a dream layout.

So when we recently moved back to Ontario, I found myself once again in a rented home, no dedicated train room space available, but this time with two advantages that allowed me to start what I would call a long-term, serious model railroad.  Firstly, I now lived closer to the prototypes that I've always wanted to model, which is  a huge source of inspiration.  Secondly, I happened upon first the blog and then the books of Lance Mindheim, and through his writings to other folks sharing many of the same thoughts.

Lance's philosophy that immediately caught my attention was that you didn't have to have a huge layout to enjoy the hobby.  I'm a bit of a lone wolf modeller anyways, so I doubt that I would ever be able to scare up a bunch of people to run a regularly scheduled operating session.  But I knew from being a member of the Nordel Model Railroad Club in Hockessin, DE, that operating was hugely fun.  Operating what is basically a switching branch, following Lance's inspiration, should provide the ideal amount of railroading to fit my budget, inclinations, and schedule..

Budget: there's never enough money available for a model railroad(er).  Narrowing my focus down to one branchline in a specific time period suddenly made it possible for me to shed all the interesting but now extraneous models that I'd collected over the years.  In theory it should also keep me on the straight and narrow should I wander into a hobby shop or show.  And the freed up funds would allow me to build a high-quality, highly detailed small layout.  Bingo!

Modelling inclinations:  I hold myself to very high standards.  I want to build close to museum quality track, have very detailed & weathered cars, locomotives, and buildings, and really believable scenery.  Frankly, the only person I trust to meet those standards is me.  If I don't, I won't have a problem ripping it out and doing it better the second or third time.  I'm a perfectionist, which means I frustrate myself and others as I strive towards perfection.  It's unattainable, but in the striving comes the learning and improvement, and for me, the fun.

Schedule:  I travel a lot for work and also have four small children, so my hobby time should be quite limited.  Only by grace of an incredibly supportive, understanding, and patient wife am I able to devote as much time to my obsession as I have.  A small layout means that I will better be able to balance family, work, and hobby, while living within my means and being more likely to achieve a certain degree of completeness in a reasonable timeframe.

With all this in mind, I was able to settle on a prototype (CN), location (Waterloo spur St. Jacobs & Elmira for now), timeframe (1988 - 1993), and layout style (sectional, around the walls on shelf brackets).  That's pretty much the hardest part.  30 years on I'm ready for some serious modelling!  Let's go!

A few words on how I ended up choosing this branch line as the subject of my modelling.  There were two main sources of inspiration for me: 1) having attended the University of Waterloo myself, whose campus the spur runs through, and 2) Lance Mindheim's (and others') writings on the play value and interest to be had in running a small, prototype-based layout.

The first point is pretty much self-explanatory.  I would venture a guess that most modellers are drawn to the trains they watched in their formative years, when they first had the freedom to go out into the world and could choose where to go to watch trains.  For me that was initially Canadian National's Oakville sub, running through my hometown.  I made many GO train trips to Toronto in the mid- to late '80s and '90s to scout out the track layout around Spadina and the CN Tower, and actually drew many trackplans to fit an expanded version of my parents' house.  I wonder where those pieces of paper are right now.  I'm pretty sure they've not been thrown away.  Looking back, one has to wonder how I thought I would be able to manage modelling a 3- and 4-track mainline, pre-DCC to boot!  We'll leave that to Jason Shron and others.

It was while attending university that I came to appreciate CN's secondary mainline through Kitchener and the occasional short local that scooted through the UW campus.  Unfortunately I did little to document it, and remained ignorant of the CP operations that were abandoned just as I graduated.  However, those times and trains have kept coming back to me over the years as I've planned layouts, started the occasional layout, and certainly as I've collected rolling stock in anticipation of having my dream layout.

There have been many distractions along the way, in terms of deciding on which prototype to follow.  Living in Germany, there was no shortage of small branch lines with healthy doses of picturesque scenery, steam and/or electric motive power, plenty of passenger trains that I'd actually had the chance to ride, and interesting freight operations.  

In Georgia an absolute gem of a prototype is the former Gainesville Midland RR, now CSX.  Multiple six-axle diesel consists pulling long strings of feed hoppers through the razorback hills between Gainesville and Athens, small-town Southern stations with big-time Amtrak & NS operations, shared switching of the local feedmills, and kudzu everywhere!  I might still come back to that one.

A move to Delaware introduced me to the former Octararo branch of the PRR, which was operated by a series of shortlines with interesting motive power pulling short trains through the beautiful countryside near Kennett Square, PA - mushroom capital of the world!  Just as Gainesville was chicken capital of the world!

Upper New York State offered the water level route of the NYC/CSX, but more interesting was Susquehanna's Utica branch.  The list of fantastic prototypes could further include the Delaware Lackawanna in Scranton, the Maryland Midland in lower Delaware, the Ontario Southland/Guelph Junction Railway, the Livonia & Avonville in the Southern Tier, and many more that would each make a fascinating history lesson as well as intriguing model railroad.

In the end, it always seems to come down to what you feel the most connected with.  Model railroading is very much an exercise in nostalgia, even if you're modelling what you see outside your window right now.  You are capturing a moment in time, and for most people that moment recedes into the past with each day that the railroad in the basement exists.  We look for ways to capture a favourite location/motive power/operation, or perhaps just the feeling we ourselves experienced at a particular time in our lives.

For me, that time was my university years, where the trains were captivating, not yet obsessively so as they are now, but where the adventure of being away from home was the larger picture.  Building a model railroad based on the CN operations of that era allows me to also think back fondly on the friends, cars, travels, and adventures of that time with each trip into the basement to work on the railroad.

More on narrowing down the choice of a prototype and the role my second source of inspiration played in the next post.