I like going back and modeling My favorite railroad. I also like it because it gets you away from the drag of every day life.
I enjoy scratch building and super detailing unique pieces rolling stock and structures in obscure gauges and scales (proto-lancing). I like making detailed trackwork and enjoy the thrill of seeing something I built running flawlessly over the tracks, however, I also use RTR locos and parts when available (why reinvent the wheel). I also like creating super detailed scenery for the trains to run through. Since I model narrow gauge Large Scale indoors, I can have only a very limited amount of scenery but what I have I like to super detail. Since this scale, gauge and era is a scratch builder’s and kit basher’s paradise, I enjoy looking through older Model Railroader and NGSL (both new and older issues) magazines for plans, scratch building, weathering, and modeling articles.
Getting to be the overlord…
Running trains…
Getting to be the overlord…
When I feel like it, I decide to be the mean overlord. I send 100+ MPH winds thru the town (As I sneeze…), send in the plague of smellyness, (Take a hint…) and unleash the 87’ tall monster known as… SEVEN THE COCKATIEL!!
DUN DUNDUN!
For me, it’s really simple. It’s the vision. I have a vision of the dream railroad I am trying to build and operate and that’s what keeps me going. Progress has been frustratingly slow in getting there. I greatly underestimated the amount of time it takes to accomplish certain tasks compounded by the fact that my lack of organizational skills forces me to work twice as long to get half as much done as it should. If I had to do it over again, I might have planned a more modest sized layout but I am too far a long now to look back. This is the railroad I am going to finish if I don’t tip over first.
Okay, I have had a chance to work on this a bit more. It 'll be a bit philosphical…maybe…
(…oh, come on, it won’t be that bad!!)
I have lived a bit. When I was younger, I was hugely self-absorbed. Like many young people, I concluded at times that the older generations comprised some real dullards, incompetents, people who were generally ignorant about all the wonderul things that I really “got”. I still live in my own head a great deal, but I have learned humility. Now that I have raise three girls, I honestly do…finally…“get it.” My parents were wonderful. Their parents were incomprehensibly wonderful.
I find that when I look back on all the amazing engineering, the thinking, and then the actual pragmatic solutions to real-world railroading problems in the years prior to WWI, I can only stand in awe of it all. If any of you, for example, have ever taken the time to study what an injector does, you will have to agree that it is an ingenious device…already discarded, and feedwater heaters and pumps were replacing them around the time that I mention. More than anything else I know well enough, the railroad is the proof of the indomitable spirit of the human, enterprising or merely contributing. I have no association with it, to my regret, but I can capture some of the enterprising and the contribution to its evolution in my very own basement.
Does that make sense to some of you?
There, that wasn’t so bad…
The details, trying to make things look real and always having something different to work on. Using the Internet to find info has really gotten me re-hooked. I was never one for snail mail or buying books. Being able to find instant info on the web has made things a lot less frustrating. You could order something from a black & white ad in a magazine and still really not know what you were buying until it arrived.(and hope you weren’t disappointed.)
[(-D] Unfortunately your right, we are often a pretty sorry lot in that regard.[(-D] I haven’t added a nude in any structures or parts of the scenery yet but had been considering it for a Pullman car. Maybe now I won’t because it is so “common”.
True, the US without railroads would be a very different beast. Hey we wouldn’t even have to switch to daylight savings time because “railroad standard time” would have never been “invented”. Want to be humbled a bit more read the books Passage to Union can’t recall the female author’s name and The World the Railways Made by Nicholas Faith. Even then they don’t do it justice. The more I learn the more I am amazed at what the railroads brought about (like being the first industry to really use bar code identification technology in 1969). I’ve done every major paper for classes (Economics, Finance, Engineering Design, Telecommuications Networks) for my current Masters Degree program using the railroads as an example. It supplies a seeming endless source of subject material.
Sometimes the only thing that keeps me interested is inertia. Occasionally I get into the “what’s the point” mode, and the only reason I keep going is that’s what I do for a hobby. Then the interest returns, and that keeps me going.