How did you get started in the hobby?


My first equipment was Lionel O in 1960 at 3 years old for Christmas-there's a few photos of me with that under the tree. My first HO was a Tyco set in 1967, I've dabbled with N and G, but stayed with HO. I was "in hibernation" with model railroading while in college and then graduate school. I've been ever so slowly rebuilding an HO layout I got from an estate about nine years ago.

Photoman475
 
I guess I am sort of like the D&J Railroad. I can't remember a time when we didn't have Lionel trains. We had a permanent set up in an out building. I also had a number of uncles working for the Northern Pacific and the Milwaukee Road. When I was about 10 or 11 years old, I got to start riding in the cabs of locomotives, steam, diesel and electric.

Nuff said ???? I was hooked. We changed from Lionel to HO scale at about this time and I never looked back. When I joined the Navy, needless to say there was no model railroad, but after I got out after six years, I started a small N scale layout that could be slid under a bed. No room in an apartment for anything much bigger. In the mid 70's I moved back to Montana and built a house, with a basement. I incorporated my small N scale layout into a larger railroad, with about 11 scale miles of main line. This was in the late 70's or early 80's. I did get very discouraged because the running quality of the majority of N scale locomotives were what I would term miserable compared to what is available today. I ripped everything out and moved on to HO scale. The locomotives ran so much better and I got into custom painting and detailing. The larger size made this a lot easier.

I had a very good friend locally who also was starting an HO scale railroad. We worked out a plan where our railroads interchanged with each other and actually laid out our railroads on a USGS map of the area we lived in. We both freelanced and I custom painted locomotives for both of our railroads, along with an assortment of freight cars. Unfortunately my good friend passed away, but I stuck to my plan and it has been working out very well. I did have a period of about ten years that the layout was what I would call dormant, mainly because I had no hobby shops at all in the are where I live. In recent years e-retailers have filled the gap and the layout is now moving forward again.
 
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Before I was born, my father bought some American Flyer trains for my older sisters. When I was about 7, he built a 13' x 8' L-shaped layout in the basement. There wasn't much in the way of scenery. Eventually my aunt gave me her Lionel trains and we managed to squeeze them onto the layout.

Steve S
 
I got my first train from our neighbors when I was 5. I remember it being a frustrating mess. I had to set it up and take it down all the time. It was on carpet so I spent more time putting it back on the tracks than running it. Both of my brothers were in wheelchairs so it was in the way. Needless to say interest was lost quickly. Fast forward 39 years. About 4 years ago I was doing a lot of business on Ebay. Mostly RC plane stuff. My step son and my youngest son loved the planes so I ended up keeping a lot of stuff for them. Not profitable! I decided to buy and sell model trains because I had no real attachment to them. I bought mostly distressed items and repaired them for resale. Then I needed a test track. That was boring , so I added some scenery. I really started to enjoy them so what would it hurt if I kept a couple of them? The more I tinkered with them the more I liked them. A couple turned into about 20 engines, who knows how much rolling stock, roundhouses, turntables, coal mines, etc. etc... I still buy and sell a lot of stuff, but now it's pretty much to support my train addiction.
 
This thread is better then most train magazines.

Thank you everyone for sharing your great stories.
 
I got into it when i was born basically when i was about 5 or in 2005 i got a life-like(ho) set from a toy store i already had a spectrum switcher that was beat up that i got from my GreatGrandma and set it up and ran them a whole bunch i kept getting more and more engines not being able to focus on cars. Today im in n-scale because of a lack of space with a 5x5 layout
 
I got started with a wind up Marx set, that was a figure 8. That was at age 4. By 5 I had an electric Marx set that had only a circle of track, but I was very disappointed, as the track had 3 rails, and the real trains had 2. For Christmas when I was 6, I got an American Flyer dual train set. One diesel, PA-1 and a 4-4-2 steamer. There were lots of cars and other accessories. I was very happy as I could fill the entire living room with track and run trains to my hearts content. You could say that I loved them to death, as within a year and a half they were dead, completely worn out. AF was hard to find in a small town, and at age 8 my Dad took my over to Pratville, Alabama where there was a real model RR shop. There I discovered HO. My Dad let me buy a kit. Now I had also been building plastic models of airplanes, cars, tanks etc, since I was 5, and the Athearn BB kits just looked too simple, so I got a Silver Streak Dbl door auto box, lettered for the Southern, my favorite road, that ran through our home town. I used elmers glue to put it together and had to wait another weeks for a set of trucks. I used the dummy couplers that were in the kit for the time being. I painted the roof and ends with the closest colors I had in my paint box, and for almost a year I displayed it and other kits I acquired until the Christmas when I was nine, when I got a Varney train set. I got other things as well, extra horn hook couplers so the kits I built could run in the train, and a 4-4-2, extra car kits, trucks turnouts etc. I was off and running and have been doing so ever since. I'm now going to be 61 this year, and I still have that first kit. Don't really remember what happened to the other kits I had from that time, but I did keep my first one.

While I did intersperse my trains with other "hobbies", like building all of the Revell 1/96 sailing ships, trains remained my primary hobby, as it is today. I learned a lot over those years and I do try to help with teaching what I know by distributing that knowledge as best I can when asked.
 
After reading mantua mikes post, it becomes really clear how addictive this hobby is. At least we don't have to stick a KD in our arm or snort something up our noses.

On second thoughts, smoke generators might fall into that category. No-ones stuck a j**nt in their chimney have they?
 
It all started when my dad bought my brother and I a ho scale Santa Fe train set. I was probably 5 or maybe a bit older when he bought that set. My dad would set it up on the kitchen table for us and let us "run" the train on a small circle of track. From there, he built a small layout in the spare bedroom that was basically track nailed to plywood, and we had an old power pack that had dual controllers so we could each control a train that went in a circle (double track mainline). Then he built is a new layout that had scenery and buildings, pretty much a small cramped layout but we loved it. When I was about 17 we decided to build a big layout downstairs and had that in place til my parents sold their house in march 2013. So that's the history of the layouts.
As a kid I remember my dad telling us stories about his days on the Milwaukee road and we would watch Pentrex movies about various railroads. When I was about high school age, my dad got me a camera and we would go to Bensenville yard to photograph trains or I would hang out with my dad at work. So for the longest time I had an interest in trains.
 
G'day Red....Love the topic by the way....I had a very basic train set as a kid...as most boys do ...however I ended up playing tons of golf , and cricket and fishing..One day about seven years ago a nice bloke was invited to our town to exhibit a great modular N Scale layout for the weekend..His name is Rob Mathews...I went in for a look about 10 am on the cold freezing winter morning and finally walked out of the Town Hall..four hours later...just absolutely inamid of this amazing , highly detailed layout that was more than a third the size of the hall...It took him and his son about three hours to set up..Although I didn't do it immediately...the seed was planted..and about three months later I bought a Bachmann Thunder Valley N Scale set...before I knew it I'd bought an Alaska set , some set track , and components..I began building a small layout...was really enjoying it ....really enjoying it , hooked is more accurate... Then one Saturday I was visiting a close friend and I happened to mention my new hobby.."Come and look at this" he said...We went down under the house to the garage and here was a whole bunch of HO stuff that Paul had bought not too long before from an old German bloke...that he planned to use to build a layout in his new shed...I soon realised that HO was for me too...so I decided to switch to the bigger scale.. Since then I built my first layout, never quite happened as I wanted it to..and now I'm into doing it again...enjoying every last minute of it..My only regret is I was well into my forties before I 'discovered' this amazing hobby...Paul's layout is really coming together nicely...he does CN coal trains...Mine is BNSF Intermodal... Cheers Rod..
 
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A2TwrOpr:

I grew up in Franklin Park and used to ride my bike to the Bensenville enginehouse when I was in high school. Also rode it to the Soo's Schiller Park yard, IHB's Norpaul yard and the CNW's Proviso enginehouse. The biking stopped after I got my license and a car.

If you go here:

http://photoman475.rrpicturearchives.net/archiveThumbs.aspx?id=52573

http://photoman475.rrpicturearchives.net/archiveThumbs.aspx?id=50624

http://photoman475.rrpicturearchives.net/archiveThumbs.aspx?id=48663

you can see some of what I shot back in those days. I shot a lot of slides back then and they haven't been posted.

Naturally, anyone can go and take a look too! Enjoy.

Photoman475
 
I'm a car and airplane guy but I like trains also. After getting out on my own and getting married, I always liked the idea of having a model train around the Christmas tree. Nothing more than that. Usually a plastic "G" scale kit. Somewhere along the way I noticed that there was an "Alton Railroad" with an "Alton Limited" express train. Thought that was pretty cool since my real name is Alton.

I found an "Alton Limited" train set a long time ago in American Flier (S scale I think) but I didn't buy it. Probably should have.

After I married my second wife and set up a train around the Christmas tree, I mentioned to her that there was an Alton Railroad once and that some companies had created model trains based on the Alton Limited cars and steam engines. Btw, all my Christmas trains were steam as I've always liked steam.

My wife got to looking on the web and found a set of Alton Limited passenger cars in HO and she bought them for me. I didn't have any HO track or a locomotive or a controller. I bought some E-Z track and found an undecorated steamer to pull my passenger cars and put Alton decals on it.

I started reading more about steam operations - Alton in particular and got hooked on the UP steam operations.
So, now I have a small collection of UP steam engines and rolling stock. A couple of Alton steamers, the Alton limited passenger cars, several C&A cars and Alton Railroad cars. All are DCC and most have sound.

I still create a "holiday" layout and it stays on the floor a couple of months each year. I don't know when, or if, I'll ever build a more permanent layout.

After getting started, seriously started, with my Alton Limited stuff, I wanted to play with trains more than just during the holidays. I found a model train museum in an old depot a couple of towns from where I live and I started volunteering to run the model trains there on the weekends. The museum went out of business though. I then volunteered to run the model train layout at a much larger state supported museum in my area. I did that for about a year. Along the way, I learned about the full size train museum in town that has train runs twice a month from spring to fall. For the last four years, I've been volunteering out there - working in the shop on passenger cars and locomotives, mowing grass, working as a flagman when the trains run and flipping switches in the yard and on the main line.

I still put down snap together HO track every holiday season and get my UP or Alton steamers out of their display cases and run them pulling passenger cars or freight. My grand kids think it's pretty cool also.
 
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I got started in trains as a young child with 2 Lionel sets, one from the MPC era at home and my fathers vintage set from 1949 at my grandparents house. Trains became a big obsession for me then and remained that way till current day. I didnt know why they became, what I felt, was the whole reason to exhist till about 6 months ago when I was diagnosed with Aspergers Syndrome, which is a form of high functioning autism. Aspies tend to have certain obsessions, and for me it was this hobby. When I tire of it as many aspies do, we flip to something else for a bit, which for me is RC cars. I currently model in two different scales in G, 1:22.5 with LGB European trains and 7/8ths scale with live steam, both using the standard 45mm gauge LGB brand track. Indoors I have a small HO layout to run my collection of vintage brass diesels and at Christmas my father's Lionel set goes under the tree. Cheers Miketheaspie
 
RedRyder77 said:
Hey give me some credit, I'm trying to post interesting stuff in an attempt to get to know everyone! Sooooooo with that, I'll ask the question that has probably been asked to all of you about a million times already: How did you get started in model railroading? Go nuts, what was your 1st train set? How did you get it? How old were you...do you still have it?

Looking fwd to hearing your stories!
Click to expand...

Gosh! A lot of questions to answer, so I'll start from the top (First question) so here goes...

How did I get started with model railroading? Well, one Chirstmas, when I was only 7 or 8 years old, I found a model railroad set under the Christmas Tree. Unfortunately, the train was defective and I could not get it to work. Years later, when I was 10, 11, or 12, I asked for another train set. My Mom got one for me one Christmas. It was a very basic HO-scale train set, but at least it ran. I had it for a while, but eventually, it stopped working. When my Mom and I moved from North to South, I had all but forgotten about model railroading until 2013, when my brother by another mother gave me a pretty nice train set - A TT-scale Industrial Freight Set with an engine, caboose, and figure-eight track set. I've been adding to it ever since. Needless to say, I no longer have the other two train sets I was given so long ago. I wish I still had at least the HO-scale set as I had gotten mountain paper to go with it, but was not skilled at model railroad construction yet.

But anyway, there is my detailed history of my hobby of model railroading.
 
Hello, I got started in the hobby in when was a very small child of 6 years old mother and father got a Marx train set for Christmas 1957, is was the Marx 666 smoker and tender and four cars, transformer, 027 track. My father had a piece of 1/2 inch plywood 4 feet x 8 feet we made a train layout on saw horses. That was my first layout I sure loved that set of trains and I still have that set today and still works great and will always keep the set. To me Marx trains were the best trains and lasted the longest made in USA. I still collect a few once in a while from Ebay and other train shows. I am Marx nut and I love them very much all I run for model trains and collect,too me they are very cool and fun to run and set up too at Christmas around the Christmas tree, I just love doing that at Christmas. I love my mother and father for giving me a life time hobby and joy too. Thanks longbow57ca. I hope all have a great day and fun with your model trains the best hobby in the world. Thanks.
 
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