We all began MR sometime in the past. The older among us are loath to show our 3rd and 4th and 5th efforts, while proudly displaying our first layout as those images are supposed to be pathetic and cute. As skills increase we do better, but with more modern materials and MR knowledge our next 4 layouts (our “transition era”), if you will, may seem a bit embarassing to us by today’s higher standards.
So…Let’s show some our dirty laundry as we went through that “mid-life” MR crisis dwelling in what now seems like a twilight zone in our MR careers. Whatca’ got?
My submission is of my third layout, the Disputanta and Danville Western, made up when I was a newly graduated, first-job, electronics engineer in the later 60’s. I was very proud of it then, but now…well… The impossible grades in opposite directions, the melted ice-cream plaster rock. Wow!
I am still proud of the ruinous, but well executed rape of the Rivarossi AHM Y6-B with its original purchase price worth of cal-scale brass castings epoxied liberally to the loco. Looks good, but is just the wrong thing to do by today’s standards. (Cal-Scale did not make mudflaps, curb feelers or lake pipes or I surely would have added them.)
Can anyone here embarass themselves more than this?
I can’t take a decent picture to save my life, either with a complicated SLR or a “point and pray” model. Not only was my early modeling amateurish, but my photography continues to be so!
Well, you wanted an early pic, so here you go. This was my very first model railroad, circa 1992 when I was 8 years old. I even scratch built my own structures out of Legos. Judging by some of my buildings, there was an explosion at the paint factory.
Great trestle! And a Berlin 1972 layout? Heck, I was in West Berlin briefly myself in '72. My family rode the Duty Train from Frankfurt for a long weekend. I enjoyed riding the U-Bhan, but had to promise I would avoid the segments that went to the East.[:(]
Anyway, great topic. I’ll likely have the most embarrassing pics. My misspent youth shows here.
A pair of Overton’s in the “modern” Tonopah & Sumpter Valley scheme.
A well-worn RS2.
Derelict, but scratchbuilt MOW car from the Elk River Railway.
A T&SV express car. Dig those Fox trucks!
And the one thing that doesn’t shame me so badly after all these years, a caboose built on an AHM bobber chassis.
Get that poor kid some custom decals before he handletters again![tdn][sigh][D)][{(-_-)}]
I don’t know, heck, even my recent pictures are not that good, like this scratch built photo of a class N3A caboose I built about 8 years ago. The photo was taken about 3 years ago.
All our layouts were OK…At the time, they were the best we could do at that time with skills and money at hand. A lot of cool images here and some not looking embarassing enough. Some of you guys aren’t going back far enough or you came to the table better equipped than most of us guys who start out with 5 thumbs on each hand.
I did thoroughly enjoy the hand lettering on Mike’s T&SV cars. That’s the kind of embarassment we were looking for.
heh, heh, heh. Yeah, and iffn it don’t have horn-hooks, it ain’t truly embarrassing.[:#]
Actually, my first two layouts were pretty embarrassing. First was one based on the Elk River HOn30 series in RMC (Frary and Hayden IIRC). Doomed by the poor performance of Yugoslavian motive power and my amateur track laying skills, it was narrowgauge. The second was a portable switching layout that was way too heavy to be in a military family’s household goods and had frustrating brass track to boot. That was the only ROW the T&SV ever had and it stayed in Germany. I took a decade or so off, then started the present not too shabby layout as a module in the late 80s before moving to my present digs.
I would have to take a photo of a photo, which is already very crappy quality to be able to show you anything of what I did at 10 years old in 1960, if I even had photos of my model railroad stuff. Not that I’m actually loath to show you, it’s more that I’m loath to put in the effort of digging that stuff up!
The picture shows my layout I built about 20 years ago, when I got back into model railroading after a nearly 20 year hiatus. I have “grown” since … [(-D]
Absolutely! The only thing wosre than a lousy photograph is a lousy photo that some amateur like myself tried to “improve” - like this one from 1996, where I attempted to hide my basement’s cinder block walls by using MS-Paint make it look like open sky:
Found a few more pics to contribute to this thread. They are of my self-enclosed module I built in Germany when my dad was stationed there in the early 70s.
I actually still have some of the rolling stock, etc, as seen in earlier pics in the thread.
I truly regret that I have nothing to show here. Back in the day, photographs were done with film and each one was an expensive proposition for a teenager. Somewhere, I’ve got a couple of them, but I haven’t seen them for years and may never find them. I had an O-gauge layout when my age was measured in single digits, an HO-scale layout in my teens, and I pulled those same trains out of storage in my late 50s.
I’ve been happy to take pictures this time around. I see them not only a documentation of progress, but also as a guide to others. I don’t know how many times I’ve posted my earliest shots of my benchwork frame, or the same with a bit of foam on top. The pictures and the benchwork have served me well.
