Hey Tom,
I’m a musician (bass guitarist) and an ex music major and music teacher/band and choir director.
Musicians are statistically/educationally math challenged compared with other students.
Albert Einstein, even though a genius had infamously bad rhythm and had trouble sub dividing beats.
When I was a Music Ed. major in the '70s, our new Dept. head at our college, was one of the rare musician/composers who WAS good at math. He loved physics and insisted that our music dept. student body take Physics classes. We got an old John Houseman/“Paper Chase” (movie reference) “dinosaur” who
spent all class period muttering and writing obscure formulii on three blackboards. The ENTIRE music dept. was flunking physics. A huge embarassment, so they fixed us up with a young,hip, physics prof. who taught the concepts using NO math whatsoever. (Rolling balls down inclined planes, etc.)
We all earned "A"s and "B"s. I joke that I could have worked for NASA with that “A” in physics!
I’ve just purchased most of my dimensional lumber for an 8’X16’ layout and I’ve got $185 worth into that.
About $550 for locos. Another $300 or so for track, some turnouts, a little rolling stock, etc.
So already up to a grand at least.
What you put on the track costs the most, with locos being the most expensive item. What goes on the track is actually about 2/3rds of the cost of a layout. The physical plant (layout proper) is roughly the remaining 1/3rd. So if you provide the layout and all your friends provide the equipment - you’re getting the less expensive end of that deal!
(This, of course, ignores the cost of the actual floor space … )
Of the layout physical plant, basic “brown plaster” scenery is the cheapest, followed by benchwork, then electrical, and then trackwork. The single most expensive trackwork item is turnouts. Finally, the most expensive of all on the layout itself is scenery details - structures, bridges, vegetation and the myriad of other details like cars, people, animal and a host of other little detail parts.
That last item, the scenery details, can eclipse the price of everything else on the layout if you go hog wild and detail things to the hilt - especially with prebuilt stuff. For instance, I have one area where I’ve used a lot of Canyon Creek Scenic’s trees. Their trees are killer level quality, and they’re $20 a pop. I can easily fit 50 trees into an area a couple square feet in size, so that’s $500 per square foot for that area. And that’s the basic trees - they also have one-of-a-kind trees they’ll do for you with eagle’s nests, multiple curved trunks, moss and lichen detail - for $100 per tree. Of course you can build the trees yourself for a lot less, but don’t ignore the time commitment to build 50 highly detailed trees.
Bottom line is scenery details, especially premade ones, can
I long ago lost track of how much I’ve spent and what I bought at list and what at discount. I don’t have a big enough layout to use everything I’ve got so I don’t know how you figure that in. But the truth is, it’s not important. This is a hobby and while I have a plan for an operational layout I also have things I like that won’t fit in. The main layout is S, but eventually, I’ll have some kind of a layout/display in HO, O, Lionel, Sn2 and maybe N and G as well.
In Spookshow’s (Mark Peterson) terrific blog he’s chronicled what he’s spent on the last two layouts he’s contructed-- now keep in mind that these costs do not include engines, rolling stock or the DCC to power the trains. These are N-scale layouts…
Layout size 7.5 x 4.5 - Cost $5431.00 or $160 per square foot (layout completed and sold)
Layout size 7.5 x 3.5 - Cost $2771.00 or $105 per square foot (layout not totally completed)
Mark does use a lot of pre-built stuff and he loves lighting & signals which really boosts the cost, and he does buy a lot of stuff at his local hobby shop, which I don’t consider to be a bad thing. I think the information is interesting none the less.
Building a heavily urbanised layout probably cost me a lot more per square foot than if I’d done a more rural setting, and I used offcuts and leftover building parts where possible.
I think some of these guy’s built there layout years ago. I spent close to $500 of my first layout, but that was 15 years ago. My extention that is 2.5 X 14 is close to $2000 and that was using some recycled pieces on it.
Boy, howdy, Joe Fugate’s sure on the button with the cost of scenery items–I just spent about $9 for a little rowboat so the $10 kids I bought a couple of months ago would have something to fish from on Bullard’s Bar Lake. The lake itself cost me about $10 to pour a couple of years ago. All I can say, is for those amounts of money, there’d better be a lot of HO scale Kokonie Salmon in that there water!
I probably should have stated a couple more parameters to get better results. I wasn’t inquiring about room area, just actual layout size. Rolling stock and locos are not included either. I am building my first layout and am interested in a particular “look”. I was trying to find the avg costs from a person who scratch builds everything to the person who could afford to stack FSM kits where they wanted. The hardest variable to overcome is time. A person who built their layout 20yrs ago would have modest costs compared to today. My layout(actual) is approaching 280sqft. I can see from alot of these posts that I’m looking at $20-30sqft. Thats a chunk of change. This helps alot as I’m building, trying to keep this economical and progressing. Is dust considered weathering??? (joking)
The only cost I have ever been concerned with is: what do I need today and do I have the money for it? If not, how long will it be before I have the money for it?
I’m affraid to know the total cost, as I am nowhere near complete, I’m on the “piece meal plan”.
If I knew back when I got back into the hobby what it would cost total to “complete”…I never would have started and probably would have opted for another trip to Hawaii.
But it gives me such pleasure! and Hawaii would be short-lived again!
As an Employee in a Coffee Shop/Bakery I know what you mean. (And I work Second/Third Shift) Anyways when I figured my rough cost per Sq. ft. I didn’t figure in locos or rolling stock. This is another one of those cases of variables(I hate math) I run primarly all Kato engines, each one has a 30 Dollar decoder, but Most where bought second hand. so about 70-80 for a used engine and about 100 for a new one. I also use Micro-trains, Atlas and Intermountain equipment. so thats about 12 bucks per car, I currently have 60 or so cars on the layout but thats not counting my passenger train, or Intermodal train. I also have a bunch of 60ft boxs I don’t run so. I figure with Rolling stock, DCC, and Locos my cost probably goes up to about 60 sq ft for the Rural areas and 70-80 for the industrial areas
