Hi, everyone!
My son and I have started getting into HO trains over the past few months. He's about to turn 4 and has always been fascinated by trains. After some trips to local club displays and shows, he said he wanted a "real train" rather than the Brio-style wooden track table he's been using for so long.
Fortunately, (or so we thought...) three of his four grandparents still had their train sets collecting dust in their attics/garages. Somewhat less fortunately, however, pretty much all of it was rusted, warped, or otherwise unusable due to decades of improper storage. After failing to bend track back into shape and having all of the wiring insulation just crumble to pieces in my hands, it became clear that anything that we could salvage from the old sets would be a maintenance nightmare, so that sort of put things on hold.
A work colleague is a rail fan and I'd been keeping him in the loop on this saga purely for his entertainment. His father, also a colleague and friend, had passed away last year and had owned a tremendous amount of HO stuff. Out of the blue, my colleague gifted us an Athearn blue box GP50 which appears to have been custom decorated and weathered by his father along with 7 cars. Floored by his generosity, there really wasn't much turning back now.
Thus was born the plan (this term is used very loosely) for our basement layout! HO gauge NS EZ-Track on a 4'x8' sheet of plywood. Construction on some seriously over-engineered benchwork began, my son and I had great fun over power tools, and the platform was soon finished. It was as I was waiting for the final coat of paint to dry that I learned 5'x9' would have given us significantly more flexibility. Oops. We started with a single DC oval. It was great fun for a time, but there's only so much time a four year old (and his older, somewhat ADD, father) can spend actively driving/watching a train just going in a circle.
As a result, we've quickly grown to a Digitrax Zephyr Xtra and a double track oval with crossovers and a small yard and it's all controllable via a fascia control panel or JMRI. I also did a decoder installation in the gifted Athearn loco to give it DCC capability and added some additional lighting. The only loco that's not DCC right now is my father's 1956 Revell New Haven F7 that he had repaired for us. My incredible LHS owner (who also did the repair) advised against decoder installation because the motor in there would just burn them up. That's no problem, since the Zephyr's jump ports allow us to control a DC loco via another throttle. Now that we're at the point where we can both run trains simultaneously and a few of them have sound, it's much more fun and interesting for both of us.
The flaw in our current layout is that my junior engineer insists on making his trains as long as possible. Our longest yard spur is only about 30" and I'm trying to enforce the rule of touching the stock as little as possible in order to keep operations somewhat realistic (and to prevent drops), so this inevitably leads to a fouling of at least one main line or at a minimum the entirety of our yard. The next plan is to expand with an L-shaped addition which will give us an extension of our main line, a reversing section so that we aren't limited to always traveling counter-clockwise, a proper(-ish) yard for building and tearing down longer trains, and some loco storage so that we can convert our existing yard to a few industry spurs for some more realistic delivery operations.
I've already learned a lot from lurking, but I'm also looking forward to joining in the conversation as I start to feel like I know what I'm talking about =)
-Brian
My son and I have started getting into HO trains over the past few months. He's about to turn 4 and has always been fascinated by trains. After some trips to local club displays and shows, he said he wanted a "real train" rather than the Brio-style wooden track table he's been using for so long.
Fortunately, (or so we thought...) three of his four grandparents still had their train sets collecting dust in their attics/garages. Somewhat less fortunately, however, pretty much all of it was rusted, warped, or otherwise unusable due to decades of improper storage. After failing to bend track back into shape and having all of the wiring insulation just crumble to pieces in my hands, it became clear that anything that we could salvage from the old sets would be a maintenance nightmare, so that sort of put things on hold.
A work colleague is a rail fan and I'd been keeping him in the loop on this saga purely for his entertainment. His father, also a colleague and friend, had passed away last year and had owned a tremendous amount of HO stuff. Out of the blue, my colleague gifted us an Athearn blue box GP50 which appears to have been custom decorated and weathered by his father along with 7 cars. Floored by his generosity, there really wasn't much turning back now.
Thus was born the plan (this term is used very loosely) for our basement layout! HO gauge NS EZ-Track on a 4'x8' sheet of plywood. Construction on some seriously over-engineered benchwork began, my son and I had great fun over power tools, and the platform was soon finished. It was as I was waiting for the final coat of paint to dry that I learned 5'x9' would have given us significantly more flexibility. Oops. We started with a single DC oval. It was great fun for a time, but there's only so much time a four year old (and his older, somewhat ADD, father) can spend actively driving/watching a train just going in a circle.
As a result, we've quickly grown to a Digitrax Zephyr Xtra and a double track oval with crossovers and a small yard and it's all controllable via a fascia control panel or JMRI. I also did a decoder installation in the gifted Athearn loco to give it DCC capability and added some additional lighting. The only loco that's not DCC right now is my father's 1956 Revell New Haven F7 that he had repaired for us. My incredible LHS owner (who also did the repair) advised against decoder installation because the motor in there would just burn them up. That's no problem, since the Zephyr's jump ports allow us to control a DC loco via another throttle. Now that we're at the point where we can both run trains simultaneously and a few of them have sound, it's much more fun and interesting for both of us.
The flaw in our current layout is that my junior engineer insists on making his trains as long as possible. Our longest yard spur is only about 30" and I'm trying to enforce the rule of touching the stock as little as possible in order to keep operations somewhat realistic (and to prevent drops), so this inevitably leads to a fouling of at least one main line or at a minimum the entirety of our yard. The next plan is to expand with an L-shaped addition which will give us an extension of our main line, a reversing section so that we aren't limited to always traveling counter-clockwise, a proper(-ish) yard for building and tearing down longer trains, and some loco storage so that we can convert our existing yard to a few industry spurs for some more realistic delivery operations.
I've already learned a lot from lurking, but I'm also looking forward to joining in the conversation as I start to feel like I know what I'm talking about =)
-Brian
