Found myself musing the other day, that if I won the lottery I would be able to afford a few more nice Tsunami decoders or similar to put in more of the used loco bargains I could pick up on Ebay. Weird eh? but I think that is what I would want to do.
Also, I did not mind in the least last week when my wife called everyone else in the house to come and see “What Dad is doing now!” …I was painting pink noses on a herd of herefords for the new stock yards. What’s their problem? [8D]
I was in a brand new unoccupied warehouse the other day. It was a 100,000 SQ. FT. It was massive on the inside being empty. I thought if I won $50,000,000.00 in the lottery I would bring in the best model builders and build a scale CPR line from from Vancouver to Calgary. It would include waterways, airports, industries and anything else one might find along the way. Something along the lines of Wunderland in Germany.
Brent
There are times I consider what difference there would be if I had more money for my model railroad. The only significant change would be if there were enough money that I could retire from my job, then I could devote more time to my layout. I spend so little on model railroading that money is not a limiting factor; my progress is primarily regulated by the amout of time I can spend on the hobby.
Show me someone who says they’ve never indulged in the “if I had a million dollars” hypothetical and I’ll show you a bald-faced liar. I have to smile. I say at first that I’ll give most of it to a myriad of worthy charities and quit my job so I can go feed starving children in Outer Zarathustra. Right. In reality, I will quit my job, buy a fleet of the baddest brass locomotives out there, and spend all my time building the BIGGEST GRONKIN’ LAYOUT THE WORLD HAS EVER SEEN!!!
Actually in real reality a million dollars is nothing these days. I mean the average price of a house in the US is 1/4 million. If one really wants to have lots of money they need to have a billion dollars. What does a billionair model railroader do? He does this → http://www.gfsm.org/
Personally I agree with a prior poster. Money has never really been the roadblock to making a really cool model railroad. Time is. A lot of money would allow me to quit work. Then I might actually have time to work on the trains.
On the other hand, iIf I had about 20 million dollars I would probably be restoring some 1:1 locomotive with the money and not necessarily spending it on models.
If I had a million dollars
We wouldn’t have to walk to the store
We’d take a limousine because it costs more
We wouldn’t have to eat Kraft dinners (but we would eat Kraft dinners - we’d just eat more!)
Ah, classic BNL!
I have this same dream too - but then it turns into a nightmare after all those ‘best model railroaders’ start fighting with each other over rivets…
I’m glad I wasn’t the only one that started running that song through the brain! [:D]
As to what I’d do with a large sum of money, I’d do a few things:
Buy a house with enough room for me, my wife, dogs, potential children, and a large layout.
Buy a commercial building.
Open up a hobby train shop, not necessarily to make a huge amount of money, but to support my hobby.
Rent out the rest of the commercial building to make money.
Seems like a decent plan to me! Now to win the lottery. [:D]
[(-D]I always think what kind of layout or LHS I could fit into a big empty space when I see it!
I would move somewhere that was a hot railfanning spot with a large model railroader population and open a hobby shop with a large, connecting layout room.
Sure I think about winning the lottery - though I’d go for more like $25,000,000 if you don’t mind.[:)]
Besides the obvious stuff (quit my job, pay off the mortgage, buy a new car) I do have something I’d like to do. Back when I was a kid-teenager there used to be a model railroad display at our state fair every year, it had it’s own little wood building. It was HO, it wasn’t huge but it was fun to see all the trains for $1. Eventually during one winter vandals broke in and destroyed everything to the point where the owner (who was getting along in years) didn’t have the time/money to rebuild. The vacant building is still there 25+ years later on the fairgrounds.
I’d like to buy the land it’s on and construct a new larger display layout. Maybe indulge my old love of three-rail by making it a 1:48 Lionel layout, or even use reproduction standard gauge trains. It would be fun to be able to spend a couple weeks a year running trains and meeting people at the fair.
Ah…I was too subtle. My point was that even with the ability to buy rtr, brass etc. hire others to build my layout a la Rod Stewart, my first impulse was to stick to buying decoders and using them to improve someone else’s castoffs that I found on Ebay. That process is the most fun.
If I had a few million dollars to play with I would buy a REAL train. Really, I would. I would buy an old steamer and pay a shop to rebuild it so I could play with it for real on an abandoned shortline I would buy expressly for the service of using my loco/ restored cars.
Steamtown or Strasburg RR could do the restoration.
I would give rides on it as a business expense to write it off on my taxes like the wealthy do.
I would hire engineers to travel me around the country on friendly-to-private-steamer-owners-operators railroads whilest I sat back in my personal presidential car, taking control of the loco when I wanted.
I would only model 1:1 then.
Really, I would.
Yeah, point taken about the lowly million dollars. In fact I don’t buy lottery tickets much, and then only when the jackpot climbs well into the 20s. Who wants to share 3 million with 4 other winners! In my area average house prices are over 1/2 a million and edging back up now.
But isn’t 1:1 just a money pit? I wonder if even 20 million would get one enough real estate and technical knowhow to have a 1:1 hobby. Certainly not around here. And one would have to commit to four years of study for a non-stationary steam ticket I am told…necessary if one were to take the loco out on some public track.
As always I stand willingly to be corrected. Just repeating what I heard on the very topic yesterday.
What are the guys thinking that actually have a million? and there are plenty of them and a lot on this forum, only they will not admit it, I would buy every C.P.R. northern in brass and be the only guy that has them, although there were only 2 made. How’s that for being a spoiled brat ? Really, along with my engines there are a couple of families in town that would get some well needed help.
Retire.
Back in the 50’s Linn Westcott did an article in MR called If I had a Million (trackplan in 101 Track Plans).
As I recall the plan called for a 50x55 foot separate building, the layout occupied most of the space with a radial aisle design that took up 3 corners. The 4th corner had an balcony where the operators sat and were able to see down each aisle so they could control their trains (this was before walk around became popular). Under the balcony area was a bathroom and work shop.
Of course now you need more than a $1M.
Enjoy
Paul
I’ll never forget that place. The first time my Dad brought me (I was about 8 years old) and my little brother in there, I was in awe.
It was a good sized L shaped layout about 40 feet by 15 feet if I remember . I would spend hours watching the trains. I would say that layout inspired me and still does to this day
Well, if I had a million, I’d be doing some other things with it–probably donating a large sum to my Parish’s homeless fund and the ASPCA–
BUT–if I had some left over, enough to spend on the MR, I’d probably leave the layout alone, except for putting in a nice, large staging yard, and then I’d have someone–ANYONE BUT ME–convert my large brass fleet to an absolutely BUG-FREE DCC system (I mean no bugs ANYWHERE!), but only after THOROUGHLY convincing me that pressing a bunch of numbers into a keypad is more fun than working a hand-held throttle (you ARE kidding, aren’t you?[:O])
And then, after realizing that with the amount of trains I ever run at one time isn’t worth the expenditure I just did, I’d have them come back in and rip the whole thing out and put me back on DC.
And to think, I could have also given THAT money to the homeless or an animal shelter. [:-^]
Tom [:)]
At 61 and retired, I am in the process of simplifying my life rather than contemplating how, with more money, I could further complicate it.
I have all the time in the world so a big chunk of dough like a million bucks coming at me would not create more motivation, would not improve my health and I sure don’t need more layout space - I am happy with what I have. From experience, It seems that the more money you have the more your costs seem to rise as well. With a windfall of a million bucks I would probably find new ways to get into trouble and that is not nessesarily a good thing.
Bruce[:)]
Now that Florida has the Powerball, I play it. I like it better than the FL lottery because the low-end prizes pay better, and let’s face it, I’m not likely to ever win the big jackpot.
Not that I haven’t given some thought to what I’d do if I did win the top jackpot! First of all, my immediate family and I have an agreement that if we ever win a lottery jackpot, we’ll split the money (there are four of us). In this Saturday’s Powerball drawing, that would leave each of us about $6.75 million after taxes. After setting aside about $4 million of that in interest-bearing accounts that would allow me a decent annual income from the interest, I’d do something similar to what Arjay1969 would do:
(1) Quit my job, fix up my house, re-landscape my yard, and set up an annual donation fund for worthy charities.
(2) Build a commercial building and set aside part of it for a hobby shop. Like Arjay, the goal would not be to make money, but to support the hobby. The Ocala area has two hobby shops, but neither concentrates on southeastern railroads. My shop would, and would be exclusively train stuff. This building would be built somewhere along CSX’s “S-Line” and would have a public train-watching balcony on the roof of the building, accessible from inside by elevator.
(3) Set up the back of the building as a garage for some collector cars my brother and I would likely buy (my first one would be a late 1940s Chrysler Town & Country convertible).
(4) In the space between the hobby shop and the garage, build a layout representing the Jacksonville subdivision of the Seaboard Coast Line (which could also represent the ACL and SAL before the merger), with a full-scale model of Jacksonville Union Terminal at one end and a full-scale model of Tampa Union Station at the other. The layout room would be open to the publ
Yes, sometimes we get carried away. A few weeks back I realized that I’d searched the web for examples, printed out several and opened up 4 different colors of paint just to finish…seagulls.
The million dollars? Make retirement more comfortable, when I get to it. To tell the truth, I kind of like the whole discipline of coffee stirrers for fences, printing my own decals on the computer, and looking for bargains in the Walthers catalog and at train shows. I’ll be starting an extension of my layout in a few months, and that should keep me busy for another couple of years, at least. I’ve already got more cars and engines than will fit on the layout even with the extension, and once it’s operational, it will be about as much as I can handle by myself. So, that may be all I need.
Here’s hoping you win that Powerball, BHirschi. You see, I’m keen to have a Doodlebug in SAL paint and perhaps after your win, and you order a Doodlebug for yourself, you may like to defray costs and order a Doodlebug for me at the same time[;)]
Thanks in advance[:D]
Bruce[:)]