From a very early age, I’ve looked forward to being able to build a “lifetime layout”. This would be a big model railroad that would take decades to complete, the kind of grand, multi-operator basement-filler that has been the subject of so-many articles in the model railroad press over the past fifty years. To date I’ve worked on a number of other model railroading projects, but until now haven’t really started work on the “lifetime layout”.
My brother and I started our first HO layout when were in junior high school and worked on it, off and on, until we went off to college. This was a freelanced model of the Chesapeake & Ohio in a vaguely West Virginian setting built into a ten by fifteen foot space at one end of the basement playroom. We built it very much on the cheap, with scrap lumber, reclaimed wire and a lot of hand-laid track to keep the costs down. Bob became quite skilled at hand-laying turnouts. One that stands out was an impressively-long number 14 turnout that lead into the caboose track in our large stub-ended yard.
The track plan was pretty much that stub-ended yard feeding into a loop that circled an operator’s pit three times at various elevations before returning to the yard- very much a typical 1960s design built in the early 1980s. While there were a few customer spurs off the mainline, there wasn’t much to do other than run a single train in circles. We later added a branchline off of the mainline onto a stretch along one wall, but we were losing interest and didn’t develop it very much. We never got around to filling in any scenery around its open-grid benchwork.
After we each went off to college, it sat in our parents’ basement for a couple of years until we took it down, then our father built a Lionel layout in its place.
-fm