Hello everyone. So which is your favorite part of the hobby ?. Building your layout, adding new buildings and scenery, buying new engines and rolling stock, kitbashing engines or cars or just kicking back and running your trains ?. I personally prefer kicking back and running trains. Everything else takes too much effort but then I’ve never been known for being real energetic…
Tracklayer
My favorite thing is a relaxed operating session with good friends.
Dave
The whole enchilada![:D]
I like the variety. Some days I feel like building structures or a car, maybe scenery, others I prefer to run trains. Not only are there a variety of things to do, but you can watch your own skills improve. If I get the chance to go to a train show I take it, whether I plan to buy or not. Can always learn something and get new ideas.
Have fun,
Richard
I don’t do that fine detail as I once loved, old eyes have made it difficult and much of the pleasure faded, however I do enjoy operations, just running the rails and running at open house.
I’m with Ken… The Whole Enchilada… and extra salsa!
Well, what I’ll do is tell ya’ about my LEAST favorite aspect of the hobby and say that EVERYTHING ELSE is head-and-shoulders above that…and my least favorite IS crawling around under my workbench looking for the slippery grab iron that just flew out of my tweezers!
Aside from that… there’s the rush when you first open a kit and you can’t wait to get the sprue cutters out or eyeballing the sweeping curves you just ballasted and NOW they’re part of the scenery or watching 4 or 5 six axel Alcos pounding up a grade with a sixty car ore drag and catching the position light signal just as it drops to restricting.
Sometimes, just getting down to eye-level and taking in the scene that you have created and knowing that this represents a slice of history that will never be repeated, like the 1938 Century outpacing the Broadway as they raced eachother out of Englewood.
Other times you’re operating and everything is going just right… invariably when there are no visitors around to witness it!
Oh, I could go on… I truly enjoy every aspect of the hobby (minus that grab iron hunt) I admit I’m kind of like a bee in a flower garden, that is, I might go at some wiring for a few days then drop that and kit bash a few plastic structure kits. Sometimes I like to mindlessly assemble a dozen or so freight cars… I’m really good at starting projects, it’s that finishing thing I get hung up on! Then I might run trains for the next few weeks and not look at another project. Right now I have a backlog of airbrushing chores to tackle but I have to get in the right groove to get into the painting mood.
Did I mention photography? Sometimes it’s fun to stage photo-ops and see how close I can get to the real-world! Amazing fun!
Thanks for asking… Ed
Ed:
I’m in the same boat as you - I start projects but get hung up when it comes to painting. I have a million excuses which I won’t bore you with.
My two favourite parts of the hobby are scratch building, be it structures or critters, and lighting. I love working with LEDs and 1.5V mini incandescents, except when I mess up and blow them up after they have been installed. I have done that too many times to admit.[D)][(-D]
One of the things I don’t like is not being able to start my layout. I am waiting for my son to move out so he can take his exercise equipment out of my layout space in the garage. We live in a small house and he deserves some space for his activities so I wait patiently. He is moving in the right direction. I started to move things around last year to start building walls but quickly realized that there wasn’t enough space for both of us. So, for now my model railroading happens at the work bench. My son comes before the hobby.
Dave
I enjoy that there is the variety. Like others have mentioned, I can skip from track laying to Loco mods, scratchbuilding structures, anything. Everything has it’s “mood”. Except I don’t like track planning. Glad it’s DONE! I think my biggest fave is getting a locomotive dialed in and running smooth and quiet. Dan
For me, the fun starts with the planning process. A lot of “imagineering” has to go into it. I take a lot of care drawing up the track plan, detailing it, and in some cases, also sketch up 2-D views. Next comes the search for material, which is sometimes a tedious task, as all those nice things you can buy at your end of the Big Pond are not readily available at my side of it. For those items way beyond my budget, I have to find cheap alternatives. Quite a time consuming procedure! I also like all steps of the building part - except wiring. A soldering iron and me - two worlds apart! Luckily, a friend of mine is an electrician by trade and he also likes to help. Once a layout reaches a stage where I coulkd call it “semi-finished”, the operations part keeps me interested for a while, but not as much as the dreaming, planning and building phases. Don´t get me wrong, I also like to operate trains on my layout, but my layouts (I have built 7 or 8 over the years) are usually small, with limited operation possibilities, as neither the space I have for a layout, nor the necessary funds allow for a room-filling train empire.
Building scenery. Everything else is just icing on the cake.
Of course, I also like lots of icing.
Prototypical industrial switching and everything else is geared toward that goal.
Hello Tracklayer, I too enjoy all the different aspects. I am currently re-doing my layout and am in the wiring phase. I’m only doing a little at a time because it’s too easy to foul up. When I needed a break from that, I switched gears and began working on building a structure kit ,painting the different pieces different colors. The actual construction will be done when I’m more focused on it. I find all these different tasks enjoyable, especially when they’re done at my pace.
Eric
Building detailed individual scenes, and running trains. I also have a love of model railroad photography. I also LOVE to detail passenger cars, building interiors,etc. But my absolute favorite thing about it is when people truly enjoy a certain scene you spent hours if not months on.
I like to build models of things I’ve seen that captured my interest. I’ve always been like that. As a young kid, I’d see some that interested me, and I couldn’t wait to get home to either draw it, and / or build it in miniature. Scale has never made a difference to me. I was always glueing or nailing or screwing something together. After a step dad came into my life, I went from small town urban kid to farm boy, and with new little brothers in the picture, I spent hours (when my chores were done) in the garage making the toy farm equipment my folks couldn’t afford to buy. I’ve gone through model cars, ships, and planes, way too many to count, the same with farm and construction machinery, and buildings, houses, models of the structural frame work, etc., all to satisfy the urge to build in miniature. Later in life, I built architectural models, while studying architecture and design. Some elaborate, some just cardboard mockups to show space and shape. I’ve always been attracted to the size and power of trains, but I was never around them much. The train bug bit me hard in the early 80’s when we started having kids.
My first train was a Marx, the classic deep maroon colored ATSF switcher, at Christmas, 1954, I was 5. My dad died a few months later, and the train set, through the years with constant moving, and new half brothers and sisters, slowly disappeared through the years, one peice at a time.
Now my model building is concentrated on HO scale railroads and scenery, trying to recreate in miniature, what I see in life, so as I run a train around my layout, I can put my eye to ground level, and be satisfied with what I seen. And switching cars. The slow and steady process of moving cars in and out of industries, taking cars that have arrived, putting them in place, and making up a string of cars that need to be sent out. I could watch a crew switch cars for hours.
More recentl
Favorite thing… Escapism !
Been doing this for 50 years now , so I guess I like the whole deal. Along with that , finding new and better ways to operate my layout is great stuff . I operate in a REAL relaxed mode along with just running them i spend a lot of time enjoying myself.
My background in the hobby was three rail many decades ago so when I started the layout I developed a track plan for running trains, a double main, two crossovers, and two reversing loops.
As the layout developed I was surprised to fnd that scenery gave me the most pleasure despite my lack of artistic ability.
Bob
The modelling, I love to build things so I chose a scale where thats pretty much a requirement if you want anything unique.
There is no favorite “part”. It is the whole. It is the trains. It is all about the trains. Historical trains, Real trains, model trains doesn’t matter. Doesn’t matter if it is a whole train proper or just pieces of trains like cars, caboose, and locos. Doesn’t matter if they are running, or sitting in a display case, or even on the page in a book.
Multiple Choice: All of the Above.