Zeke and I finally did it...we have been talking about it and I have planned it for nearly 1 year now. We have started a model railroad. I decided on N-scale (1:600) just because of the size issue. We can fit SO much on a 36 inch door blank, while in HO (1:86) we would need at a minimum a 4x8 sheet of plywood.
Zeke is holding the shunter engine we bought. It is just like the ones we see at the Grand Forks Rail yard in the middle of town. The model and coloring has amazing detail and likeness. I decided to use the foam board method for the bench work. It seemed the cheapest and I could change my mind about many of the terrain elements throughout the development.
Zeke loves running the engine at full throttle and I am amazed by the amount of work and technical/artistic issues in model railroading. You could spend less than $200 and have a track stuck to a board and run and few cars in a small oval, or you could spend a little less $1,000 and have a nice well detailed layout or go on for years and spend thousands of dollars. It is up to the modeler. Zeke and I are going to start on this 36 x 80 inch tabletop layout and see where it takes us. Hopefully, a good portion of the layout will be completed by Christmas.
Here is a look at the layout looking west. Zeke and I have all the track temporally in place and we are using a track design similar to an published layout so we didn't have to figure out the wiring. The two tracks to the north (right) will be hidden behind a large hill and be a staging area and not have any scenery.
Zeke and I wanted to have some prototypes from the Grand Forks and still have hills in the layout so we are modeling "smiley" the water tower from Grand Forks and the terrain will be typically those you see in mid-Missouri. We put together a small blue yard building to help guide us in the scale. You can see the blue building (40x60 feet in scale).
Zeke mapped out where he wanted the river and roads and we cut out areas and then added more foam to create the hills and cliffs.
Here is a shot of the detail on the northwest corner of the layout. This is where the tracks cross the river on a soon-to-be-built pile bridge and heads into a narrow cliffed area. Zeke and I are going to create a lot of rock cliff and overhangs along the river bank.
