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”.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n
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.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n
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.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n
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.<\/p>\r\n-fm<\/em>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" 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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[5,1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-20","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-personal-history","category-uncategorized","post-preview"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/peremarquetterailway.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/peremarquetterailway.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/peremarquetterailway.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peremarquetterailway.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peremarquetterailway.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=20"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/peremarquetterailway.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":35,"href":"https:\/\/peremarquetterailway.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20\/revisions\/35"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/peremarquetterailway.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=20"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peremarquetterailway.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=20"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peremarquetterailway.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=20"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}