The other night while I was at work, I was sitting at my panel bored out of my skull and jotting down notes about things I would like to include on my next layout. I must say that sitting in a room for six hours at a time watching a panel of lights, indicators, gauges, and other assorted displays that never ever change really gives a person plenty of time to do some day dream modeling.
Anyway, the other guy that stands watch in the room with me who has his own equally boring panel to look at, started chit chatting and I found out something about him that I never knew. It turns out he is a very avid model railroader. Well to make a long story short, we decided to build a layout together. We came up with a list of industries to model, terrain features and such, and then we came to the topic of what road to model. He is a die hard Milwaukee Road fan, and I’m a hard core Rock Island buff. So we decided to model the year 1979, and free lance the Chicago & Pacific. Which is a railroad the resulted from the merger of the CMStP&P and the CRI&P. He’s got a nice big basement to work in, and hopefully construction will begin this weekend.
In some old MR from the Seventies there was an article about an office worker who built a shelf layout in his cubicle–perhaps a two-person mini layout from one office to the other? It could even carry mail back & forth!
Now there is a good idea. If we all brought the train to work, more people would get into the hobby, they would buy more, and the prices would come down, because of the larger production runs. Lets have Ed day, and we will celebrate with some delicious Oranges.
Good idea Ed. By the way, I got my boss to buy a cheap train set for Christmas, then we happened upon the LHS and we bought some real track. He got a freight car, and some books. He is hooked.
No no trackplan yet. We’ve got some prep work in the basement that has to get done first. I’m going to work on the wiring in the basement, while he throws up the drywall, and such. Saturday night we’re going to sit down with some cold beers, a tablet of graph paper, and see what we can hash out.