Recently we have been discussing things in MR and OGR as well as CTT, but there are a few of us who spend time gleaning other fields. In this month’s Railroad Model Craftsman (no, I don’t think they have a forum of their own) . On page 112 Bill Schaumburg suggests that the reason most model pikes never actually get finished is that THEY ARE ALREADY FINISHED IN THE MIND OF THE MODELLER. How profound! How true in my case! I have been doing the (to me) easy parts of collecting and building everything I’ll need for that Great Model Railroad I’ll Build…someday… when I get around to finishing it. Oh, it will be grand. The trains will act out all the litle stories I carry in my mind. I can see it now…SO WHY BUILD IT? In the meantime all my little actors and actresses ar patiently waiting in their boxes under my framework. Bill hits the nail exactly on the head in my case. Does he hit YOUR nails on the head too? Odd-d
Odd-d,
I sometimes get RMC off the shelf; an excellent mag.
I think in my mind about the layout almost as much as my thoughts dwell on women. I kinda have the opposite problem of wanting to do too much too quickly, and so now that I’m in my building stage, i want to slow down and think things through better.
You can plan all you want but when you actually are building the layout, it helps to be flexible enough to change your plans.
However, I realize that there are a lot of armchair modelers out there who keep acquiring more and more trains and building layouts in their minds and really intend to do a layout “soon.”
Some of this procrastination I feel, has to do with wanting everything done to perfection and thinking things through “just one more time.”
It’s sort of like sausage making; you’ve gotta get your hands dirty and things will get kinda messy, but in the end, you’ll get your sausage links. Well, that wasn’t really a suitable comparison but you get my drift.
Epiphany!
Do we build our layouts to realize our dream, or so we can share our dream with others?
John Kerklo
TCA 94-38455
www.Three-Rail.com
Mmm…sausage… 
I’d rather share my dream with others; gets pretty lonely sitting alone with just your trains…
It’s something of a kinetic ZONE thing for me, lately. I’ve been tending to be mostly a loop runner, fussing over some little nit-picky detail or other, while the consists flow by on their way to where good trains go. There may be a REAL permanent layout one day–REAL modeled mountains and such–I don’t know. There have been a number of “temporary” ones thus far. For now, the ZONE is where I like to go.
I think I have a zone too, Alton. Mainly due to time constraints, created by such activities as work, church, sleep, honey-do list, etc, the trains don’t get much more attention than running every few days. My son and I will probably begin expanding and upgrading in the next few months, but who knows how far that will go. Running, to me, is the objective, so that can happen, scenery or not.
As for your original question, Odd-d,.I don’t have enough of a clue as to where this layout might go to be satisfied in my mind with it. So, I guess I’m not in the group the author of the article talks about.