The Southern And Central: An Introduction

After many years of procrastinating, designing and redesigning I have finally taken the plunge and begun to build my N scale model railroad.

This blog will be my record of the process, stages and steps that I go through and with luck (and my motivation to write the posts) will go on for many, many years!

To start with I am going to briefly document the planning process. I say briefly because I don't recall a lot of it, it has taken so long! Once that's done my posts will reflect my current stages of work, so since I have a bit of catching up to do, I had better get on with it!

The planning stage really was broken down into a couple of different stages. I needed to work out where the railroad was going to go and therefore how much space I had and what and when I was going to model and then finally some rough (and I mean very rough track plans).

WHERE

This is not my first layout, and in the past I have been tied to my garage, which was always fine during the summer months, but not so good in the winter, also being so far away from the rest of the house, meant I didn't venture out to operate my trains nearly as much as I should have. So this time I decided I wanted to be indoors in the warmth and comfort. Surprisingly it didn't take as much convincing of my partner as I thought it was, and so with promises of keeping it small (yeah right) I pinched the spare bedroom.

There are downsides to this though.

1. It's a shared room and when we have guests they need to be able to sleep in it without banging their heads, electrocuting themselves or tripping over in the middle of the night and breaking a train..erm...their legs. Keeping the layout small and relocatable will prevent any major injuries.
2. Space is limited and needs to be flexible, so any layout will need to be relatively portable.
3. I have to keep the room in relatively the same condition I found it in, not only because it's a shared room, but because we rent the property and I don't think the landlord would be impressed if he was to find walls with huge holes in them and carpet with paint stains everywhere. Again making the layout portable so messy work can be done elsewhere seems like a good plan.

WHAT AND WHEN

As mentioned above, I am not entirely new to Model Railroading, my obsession having started when I was a boy and my father began the hobby. Over the years I have dabbled, having built a couple of not so successful layouts. I gave up on the whole thing a few years ago and am now coming back to it, a little older and hopefully a little wise. The one lesson I have most definitely learned from my experiences is that the most important ingredient to enjoying the hobby is to have patience. These are not train sets to be set up and run within 5 minutes of opening the box!

My past endeavors have always revolved around American equipment and scenery, mainly because here in New Zealand US equipment is readily available and relatively inexpensive, also its not that expensive to buy directly from the US and have it shipped here. I also lived in Northern California for a short period about 10 years ago, so I have an affinity for that part of the world.

As for when, well I don't want to get too tied down to any particular time period, but the obvious route is to keep it within the 1950's to 1970's, which I think is far more interesting that a more modern period.

What I aspire to create....

...my next post will cover off the decisions I have made about the layout plan.