After seeing what Crandell (selector) accomplished in such a short time, I’m wondering how fast the rest of you model.
Me, I model at a glacial pace. It seems like what Crandell did in a matter of months, took me four years. I normally have a couple projects in the works at one time - usually I complete a project in a few days. Sometimes, I loss interest in a project and start another one. Often it will be a week or two or three before I start a new project.
Work, the wife, dog and the dreaded honey-do list eat up a lot of my time.
My layout is two years old, the trackwork was completed fairly early on but the scenery is a work in progress issue. It gets doen when I have time, usually at Easter, Summer holidays and Christmas.
In college I knew a guy who could, and often did, build an entire layout in about 2 weeks, starting from nothing, including scratchbuilt structures and stuff. One of his buildings (a baseball stadium, with sound and lights) was even in the Walthers catalog one year. After a while he would tear them down and build something else (one time the fire department did it for him when the layout caught on fire!). He did work on oil platforms and would be home for a couple of months, then gone for a month, so he did have all day to work on them. One year, the club used his layout for news publicity for the local train show. We all laughed when the reporter asked how long it took to build something like that (it was really nice) and he said 2 weeks. She didn’t know what to say as a follow up, it was such an unexpected answer.
Me, I can be glacial depending on what I have to do next. Wiring takes me forever. It just doesn’t feel like progress because I can’t see any changes. Benchwork and laying track, much faster as I can see progress. Scenary, it depends on what it is.
My layout that you see in my Sig line was 90% done in 1 year
It’s very amature but the idea was to run trains with scenery
then go back and detail and redo as needed
Of course i have the advantage of being retired so i have more time than most
Now i’ve slowed down taking more time doing details
I had an HO layout that was 8’ x 16’, that was started in 1987 and when taken down in 2000 was about half finished!! The new layout (which was a little smaller) went much quicker, but was still only maybe half done or so in late 2005, when I learned I was going to be moving in 2006. I put an unusually strong (for me anyway) effort into getting the layout finished enough to take some good pictures and video before the layout was destroyed. I suppose it was kinda silly to spend 3-4 months frantically working on something that was doomed, but I did get to try a few scenery techniques and such that I hadn’t done before. It did turn out nice, and I got it down on film, but it only existed in a fairly “finished” state for few weeks before the Sawz-All took it apart.
I have never had great success with multi-tasking…I think it is highly overrated, Nick. So, once my old layout was reduced to concrete memories piled up in the garage, awaiting my spring trip to the dump, I got right to work one evening designing out of the new layout all the faux-pas of the first one. As soon as I had the plan, after about two hours, my mind became almost singularly absorbed with getting it built. I posted my first photos of the bench and splines at about the six week mark, and then went to work on the tracklaying…about two weeks. Remember, these were at least 6 hour days of modelling, 4-6 days a week. I had to stop to do summer outdoors stuff and run two concurrent courses for RMC. It was not until late August that I was able to get the window screening, plaster, cement, and the fine vermiculite to begin terraforming. Once again, that is all I did for about 6 weeks, plus the usual putting the garden to bed and tidying up for winter. I got tired of looking at plaster and unballasted tracks, so I began to pour ground foam on the places that were ready for it. I had a few trees left over from the first layout, so on they went, too…part of an evening, maybe?
To keep this from becoming a tome, I was able to get variety by building a redwood one time, pu
For me, construction has been progressing at a pace somewhere between snail and seriously arthritic turtle. Part of that is my own physical limitations, part is the “Honeydew” factor; but the major problem is one that no one else has mentioned:
Once it became possible to operate even a small part of my timetable, operations began to eat up time, to the detriment of further construction. Granted that the station signs are supported by toothpicks stuck into otherwise paint-free foam and that key industries are represented by empty breakfast food boxes, operating is what it’s all about - and operating when I should be building means that this layout will probably take longer to build than Cheops’ Great Pyramid!
Let’s see… Benchwork construction on my 9’x17’ layout began early last May. I got enough track laid to run a train (less than 40% of the total) about two weeks ago, with no progress since. Work seems to go in short intense bursts interrupted by (involuntarily) extended stretches of inactivity.
Off and On probably best describes my efforts. Due to various personal issues right now I’ve somewhat lost interest, although I did do my sound decoder in the dummy F7. But back when I started this layout, once I had a track plan defined, I build allt he benchwork in one weekend. It took a couple of weeks for find a reliable way t transfer the plan to the table (somethign I will NEVER do again - my plan is more like a guide to verify that what I want will fit in the space I have, not a to the millimeter reference for where the tracks go. My future endeavors will involve locating critical parts of the plan and then fillign in the rest as close to the plan as I can without outright tracing. Once I had that done, I had a train running (back and forth, no continuous loop) in another week. A few weeks after that I had the first complete loop. It took over a year after that until I finished the rest of the track. I STILL haven’t built any of the 3 remaining control panels, haven’t hooked up all the feeders (basically just the yard area), and haven’t begun scenery unless you consider some Walthers track bumpers as scenery. I haven’t even painted the pink foam with the earth brown paint I have sitting there.
In between I have done other things - built car kits, installed DCC decoders, started detailing an MDC RS-3 kit, and built some electronics.
I find it takes me two to three times longer to do a lot of things than I think it should. Part of the problem is that much of what I have been doing lately involves techniques I’ve never used before or haven’t used for a long time. I end up doing a lot of staring at a project while I contemplate how to proceed next. When doing things that I am relatively good at, things go much quicker and closer to the pace that I plan. I’ve been working hard this fall and winter on my urban area that has lots of large structures that had to be assembled and fitted on the layout. I thought I would be where I’m at now at least a month ago. I think when I move on to the more rural areas of the layout, things will go much quicker.
Fits n’ spurts describes it for me. I bought my current property in July 2000, then spent ~ 1 month erecting the benchwork (minus the top surfaces) in my garage. When winter came around and I realized that getting heat out there was not as easy as I had hoped, my work on the layout stopped abruptly. Over the next 4 years I built a series of “mega-structures” mostly for display, hoping to eventually use them on a layout.
My big break came in December 2004, when I received a modest inheritance from my late mother’s estate. I used most of this money to install climate control and insulation in the garage, and spent the remainder on track and other infrastructure. During the period from February 2005 thru June 2006, I spent an average of 20 hours/week working on that layout. Did everything myself - carpentry, tracklaying, electrical wiring, scenery - no outside help. At the end of June 2006 I had a layout that was about 80% covered by scenery. Then I suffered a case of burnout.
In the last month or so, I’ve had a resurgence of interest. Currently I’m swapping-out defective track sections/turnouts from a section leftover from my previous layout. Probably spending ~ 10 hours/week on layout work. But at least now I can run trains in between work sessions…[:P]
With honey-dues, a full-time job, and kids still living at home, free time is precious and scarce these days…
My layout isn’t called the Seneca Lake, Ontario, & Western for nothing… Been at this layout off and on for 25 years. Retirement, after all, is a really busy time of life. I have no idea how I sqeezed in work all those years.[:D]
I’ve been “back in the hobby” since buying a couple issues of MR I saw at the bookstore in late 2003 for a long drive my wife and I were taking.
Since then, I’ve learned to scratchbuild (i.e. handlay) turnouts - made about 3 or 4 now. Planned a couple shelf layouts, and that’s about it.
As far as my MRR’ing activities are concerned, I’m quite a lazy guy! I have, however, put a lot of thought into the kind of layout I’d like to have. Due to so many other things going on that require a lot of my time, I know it’s going to be an extremely simplistic around-the-walls narrow shelf layout, built one module at a time, with a temporary loop setup the whole time for continuous running.
P.S. other activities since being “back in the hobby” since 2003 have included:
-buying a house, remodeling it, starting my own business, having our first baby!, selling the previous house, buying another house, remodelling that house. Wheew, I’m exhausted just thinking about it. Now where’s that issue of MR so I can get back to my armchair modeling?
Life is funny - as much as you want to just do the “fun” stuff, you really have to do a lot of other more difficult / yet more rewarding things to enable you to enjoy the purely “fun” stuff. That’s how I am anyway… So I know I’ll enjoy even a very basic layout, even if it takes me many years to construct.
Interesting question … after 40 years in the hobby I’ve found one of the tricks is to get the right tools (like a Northwest Shortlines Chopper) and you will speed things up. There’s a whole host of tools that fall into this “faster” category.
Next, I build and use a lot of jigs for things I need a lot of, like bridge trestle bents. Jigs make it so you don’t have to keep measuring and checking things, you just slap the pieces into the jig, glue, and go.
Certain modeling materials facilitate faster modeling – building in styrene is one of them. For example, I can build a ready-to-go trestle bent out of styrene in a few minutes. I used an A-West needle point applicator to apply my MEK glue solvent, and with this applicator I can glue joints just about as fast as I can move. It sure beats using a brush to apply the solvent, no more dip brush in - move to joint - back to the bottle - back to joint … it’s just joint - apply drop - joint - apply drop: much faster!
Once I’m done applying the solvent to the styrene, I give the part about 60 seconds then I the solvent has set up enough I can add the next piece – try doing that with wood or cardstock.
To save time, if you can’t see it, I don’t model it. For example the backsides of buildings are blank sheet styrene. I don’t go crazy detailing my scenes like George Sellios does, for instance. Not only do all those details cost a lot of money, they take a lot of time to make. I model things to a reasonable and consistent level of detail, and call it “good enough”.
Finally, make good use of the great timesaver – weathering. I can take a model with only a moderate amount of detail and give it a good weathering job (don’t overdo it, subtle goes a long way) and it looks more detailed than it really is.
Even though I’m 40 years older than when I started into the hobby, I get lots more modeling done in the same period of time because I try to work a lot smart
Interesting question … after 40 years in the hobby I’ve found one of the tricks is to get the right tools (like a Northwest Shortlines Chopper) and you will speed things up. There’s a whole host of tools that fall into this “faster” category.
Next, I build and use a lot of jigs for things I need a lot of, like bridge trestle bents. Jigs make it so you don’t have to keep measuring and checking things, you just slap the pieces into the jig, glue, and go.
Certain modeling materials facilitate faster modeling – building in styrene is one of them. For example, I can build a ready-to-go trestle bent out of styrene in a few minutes. I used an A-West needle point applicator to apply my MEK glue solvent, and with this applicator I can glue joints just about as fast as I can move. It sure beats using a brush to apply the solvent, no more dip brush in - move to joint - back to the bottle - back to joint … it’s just joint - apply drop - joint - apply drop: much faster!
Once I’m done applying the solvent to the styrene, I give the part about 60 seconds then I the solvent has set up enough I can add the next piece – try doing that with wood or cardstock.
To save time, if you can’t see it, I don’t model it. For example the backsides of buildings are blank sheet styrene. I don’t go crazy detailing my scenes like George Sellios does, for instance. Not only do all those details cost a lot of money, they take a lot of time to make. I model things to a reasonable and consistent level of detail, and call it “good enough”.
Finally, make good use of the great timesaver – weathering. I can take a model with only a moderate amount of detail and give it a good weathering job (don’t overdo it, subtle goes a long way) and it looks more detailed than it really is.
Even though I’m 40 years older than when I started into the hobby, I get lots more modeling done in the same period of time because I
