Hello, all. I recently rediscovered the hobby after about a 20-year absence. Here’s my story…
I remember Santa bringing the family an HO set when I was maybe 6 or 7 years old. He set it up for us to play with on Christmas morning. Though my two brothers quickly grew bored, I thought it was about the coolest thing I had ever seen. Every year around the holidays the train would come out and I’d play and play and play and play. The rest of the year my Dad would take me to see the occasional layout in the Youngstown/Cleveland/Pittsburgh area where we lived.
When I was a pre-teen, Dad and I set out to build a cookie-cutter layout together—the Plywood Summit Lines, if that rings a bell with anyone. Actually, I don’t think he was all that interested in building a layout so much as he didn’t want me operating the table saw.
We, for the most part, finished up the benchwork, and I bought all the track, a couple of locomotives, and some rolling stock. I even painted some cars that looked pretty good. Me, the most non-artistic guy in the world, painting models! Things were looking great, we were gonna finish the layout, and I would be the happiest little model railroader in the world. But it wasn’t to be.
At this point you’re probably thinking, “Great, now Pop’s going to die in a tragic boiler explosion or something, leaving the kid to swear off model railroading forever.” Nope. Happily, Dad’s still going strong these many years later. But we never got around to finishing the layout. I probably discovered girls or something silly like that and was no longer interested, who knows. Anyway, during the next two decades (!) I didn’t really think about the hobby. Until…
Recently my Mom decided to sell the house so she could move into something more manageable for her. I went home one final time (I live in Texas now) to claim whatever stuff was important to me and found… you guessed it… my old train things. By the end of that day I’d decided that I WOULD be starting on a layout soon.
So now, after all these years, I'm back into the hobby. I feel like a kid again. I’ve started on the venerable “Southside Connecting” layout, which is a 1.5x10 switching layout from one of the Atlas books. I lie in bed at night and think about my next layout (and how I’m gonna get the wifey to go along with it
), even though I’ve barely started this one and I don’t know what I’m doing!
Anyway, it’s the 21st century now so I set off on an Internet quest to see what resources are available to help newbies like me and I came across you good folks. I’ve spent the last couple of weeks browsing the archives and seeing how things work, and I have at least 527 stupid questions to ask. So… brace yourselves.
Regards,
Jeff Sherer
Houston, TX
I remember Santa bringing the family an HO set when I was maybe 6 or 7 years old. He set it up for us to play with on Christmas morning. Though my two brothers quickly grew bored, I thought it was about the coolest thing I had ever seen. Every year around the holidays the train would come out and I’d play and play and play and play. The rest of the year my Dad would take me to see the occasional layout in the Youngstown/Cleveland/Pittsburgh area where we lived.
When I was a pre-teen, Dad and I set out to build a cookie-cutter layout together—the Plywood Summit Lines, if that rings a bell with anyone. Actually, I don’t think he was all that interested in building a layout so much as he didn’t want me operating the table saw.
We, for the most part, finished up the benchwork, and I bought all the track, a couple of locomotives, and some rolling stock. I even painted some cars that looked pretty good. Me, the most non-artistic guy in the world, painting models! Things were looking great, we were gonna finish the layout, and I would be the happiest little model railroader in the world. But it wasn’t to be.At this point you’re probably thinking, “Great, now Pop’s going to die in a tragic boiler explosion or something, leaving the kid to swear off model railroading forever.” Nope. Happily, Dad’s still going strong these many years later. But we never got around to finishing the layout. I probably discovered girls or something silly like that and was no longer interested, who knows. Anyway, during the next two decades (!) I didn’t really think about the hobby. Until…
Recently my Mom decided to sell the house so she could move into something more manageable for her. I went home one final time (I live in Texas now) to claim whatever stuff was important to me and found… you guessed it… my old train things. By the end of that day I’d decided that I WOULD be starting on a layout soon.
So now, after all these years, I'm back into the hobby. I feel like a kid again. I’ve started on the venerable “Southside Connecting” layout, which is a 1.5x10 switching layout from one of the Atlas books. I lie in bed at night and think about my next layout (and how I’m gonna get the wifey to go along with it
), even though I’ve barely started this one and I don’t know what I’m doing!Anyway, it’s the 21st century now so I set off on an Internet quest to see what resources are available to help newbies like me and I came across you good folks. I’ve spent the last couple of weeks browsing the archives and seeing how things work, and I have at least 527 stupid questions to ask. So… brace yourselves.
Regards,
Jeff Sherer
Houston, TX
