Model...

...railroading, that is. I got an HO train when I was 10-11, along with some track. I got it going, but never did much with it. It got tucked away and moved about for years. I finally hauled it out when we lived in Richmond. I started putting together a layout in the attic of our house on Junaluska Drive. It never really got that far, though. I struck it and packed it all away and brought everything on the move to Black Mountain. Here at least we had a little bit of space to put the layout. I mentioned this year that I was ready to add some scenery to the thing, and stuff magically appeared under the Christmas tree! When I was showing Greg and Kristen the layout, Greg mentioned that I had never blogged about the set-up. So herewith the genesis.

This was the first set of four cars I got, a locomotive and three pieces of rolling stock. The first batch of track I had made a simple oval. I had no switches nor scenery. But it was easy to set up and get working. I did at one point buy a book of track plans and picked the one I wanted to work on. But it was years before I actually did anything with it. When I began working on the layout in Richmond, the locomotive was no longer running; I had to pay about $25 to get someone to work it over and get it back in shape (it is again no longer working and needs a bit of an overhaul). The access to the attic in Richmond was very narrow (I don't think I have a single picture of the set-up in Richmond). The layout I wanted to build required a 4 x 8 foot piece of plywood for the base; so I had to halve that length-wise in order to get it into the attic, and then fashion it back together once it was there. That took 2-3 years. Over the course of time I managed to gather all the cork roadbed and track needed to my layout and a few new pieces of rolling stock, as well as a second locomotive. All that took another 6-7 years. You get the idea. More later...