I have no layout!

[Lillen]

Great! And in the meantime…this is a great oppotunity to check out Fremo and maybe build a module or two. You can have great fun at setups and meet lots of fellow model railroaders! Once hooked you may enjoy it so much you won’t care to make the investment in a huge layout. jc5729 John Colley, Port Townsend, WA, USA

No modules for me. I’m sure a lot of people enjoy it but I live quite a bit out in the country so I want my own stuff. Plus I’m kind of a lone wolf when it comes to modelling. Going 300 miles to some module meet just isn’t in the cards. My wife would kill me!

One of my best friends is coming over next week and we will be working non stop(or until our untrained bodies says NO) from Thursday til Sunday in an effort to have it all done. Since I will be going in and getting all the materials before hand I estimate that a whole lot will be done next week. At a minimum I expect all the exterior walls and the inside floors to be done. That is a minimum! With some luck I will be able to have most of it done by Sunday and bench work building could commence soon there after. One big problem right now is that the insulation I’m planning to use is out of stock, I can get it an other store but it’s one dollar extra per square meter. And I need a lot of insulation so that ads up before all is said and done.

Magnus

[Lillen]

Magnus, I am currently on my third layout, each bigger and better than the one before. I began with an island layout in a 10X11 spare bedroom. The next was a dogbone that occupied half my basment in an 11X28 section with a staging yard on the otherside of the dividing wall. My current layout is also a dogbone but goes completely around the outter walls of a 46X26 rectangular basement and the end loops are stacked. Lessons learned from the first two layouts have been put to good use. This time, I began with a clear concept of the freelanced road I wanted to create. The layout design is sound. The benchwork solid. The track work is much better. The structures and scenery also much better. Could it be better still? Of course, but hopefully this is the last one. I’m planning on getting carried out of what I believe is my last home (hopefully not too soon). You never know what life will throw at you and if I was ever forced to leave my current residence, my next layout would be a much smaller effort with more emphasis on craftsmanship. In any case, generally the more often we do things, the better we get at it. I’m sure you will find that to be true as well.

What you are describing is what I’m thinking. I made a lot of mistakes on the first layout. I simply didn’t know of a lot of things I now know since I had to spend a lot of time fixing them. But I feel very confident going in for this my second large scale attempt. I did have a 48 as a kid and I did build one when I got back in to the hobby two years ago but the one I tore down was built last year and was roughly 912 feet. But why I feel so positive is that I did make that work. All those tiny errors which made it an unpleasant experience to begin with was solved before I dismantled it. I had to work hard to iron out those small defects but it was worth it since I now know what to avoid. At the end, despite being subjected to temperatures between -30 degrees Celsius and +30 degrees Celsiu

[Lillen]

Magnus, you may have a bit of value there in the metal stock. Phone around and see if someone will give you a few Kroner for your trouble of delivery. Might be worth ten minutes on the phone.

-Crandell

Today I spent roughly ten minutes on the phone. Seems like I get 25 cents per kilo of scrap metal. If I have a ton, hard to know by the way, I make 250$ from this crap. Only problem is that I have to take it in while I’m doing other things since the profit get all eaten up by gas if I don’t.

Magnus