A knock on my door (or mistakes I love to make)


Rico

BN Modeller
It started like any other night, dogs in, cats in, doors locked, and teeth brushed.
Laying in bed with a large K9 on either side pinning me into a blanket burrito and contemplating the days events and those to come.
Seems like I had only just closed my eyes but it was actually two am when there was a knock at my door.
Who’s there? I whispered...
“Reality!” said the voice on the other side.
Umm Reality who? I said, pulling the blanket slowly over my eyes and dreading the response.
”Reality check” came the reply.
Crap.
Yes that nagging voice in the back of my mind was here to announce what I had suspected for some time.
My current build was fast becoming something rather unattainable.
Even with months of planning, measuring, mocking up and research I was creating a bit of a monster.

The next morning I took my AM coffee down to the “sacred chamber of the silver rails”, slowly opened the door and peeked inside.
There it was before me, a vast sea of plywood, steel rods, and copper wire traversing the walls and reaching for the ceiling tile. Maybe it was the unfinished helix that seemed to take over the center of the room, or maybe the three levels of decking covering the walls and cluttered with tools, buildings, and scenery supplies. Something didn’t seem right,
It’s not that I haven’t been thru this before, I’ve had some pretty nice layouts in the past but somehow this one seemed to be out of control.
The following night, as I lay with my limbs half on and half off the bed (remember they’re big dogs) it hit me.
What I admire most on many of the layouts I’ve studied isn’t so much the mile long trains passing each other on multiple tracks at full throttle, or the towering city structures and massive mountains I was intending on building but rather just a nice train rolling thru some basic scenery to its destination and with a purpose. Much like what I see in real life and in most places I travel. As has been said “Less is more”.
I guess my ultimate goal was to reach my favourite thing to model, being a paper mill, at the end of it all but maybe what I should be doing is starting with the mill then working backwards. Eureka!
This would allow me to concentrate on what I really want first, keeping my interest in the game and letting me get to a more finished state a little earlier.
Best of all I can repurpose most of what I’ve already constructed with minimal waste other than some cork roadbed. (I lack the patience to soak it all and pry it up)

So after this rather long winded story I think can safely announce that I have a definite goal this time. Keep it simple stupid as the saying goes?
This is it, no turning back.
With all of you as my witness I’m seriously going to see this thru.
Probably... 😉
 
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Ahhh, the things that come to one in the night.

I used to have great mid-night ideas, and realized they were gone come morning. So I took to writing these brilliant thoughts on a notepad kept on the night stand. Problem with that was, in the morning, everything I had written down seemed to be in Cyrillic.
 
I'm pretty sure we've all had that knock on the door.

I filled my 12x24 hobby room with a 2 level fully functional layout with scenery started, that was fun to operate and ran flawlessly. As with life, work got in the way and I didn't have time to even run trains. The amount of time it took to get track clean and de-cat haired just to run trains was the first sign of impending doom.
My second mistake was not leaving enough space for a workbench. I have space in other areas of the house but those are occupied by some of my other hobbies.

I ended up pulling 70% of the layout down and have an acceptable amount of benchwork to go a different direction. I'm going to do a compressed version of the port of Indiana. It's a small port area that runs one train a day around a big oval on the port property after assembling their train in a small NS yard. I have worked in the actual port quite a bit, and it just begs to be modeled.
 
Good for you, Rico. It's a big man who can critically self-examine, put a finger on what has gone wanting, and then take concrete steps to fix it/them. What doesn't bring you joy, or a living, is close to being dog poop....that's my view, may not be widely shared.
 



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