How Old Were You?


Larry

Long Winded Old Fart
How old were you when you 1st started a train layout?
Not counting when you were young & you shared your Dads layout or had 1 under the tree.
The Teenagers that are on the Forum right now, were you always interested in trains or did you start when you became a teen?

I started when I was 21 yrs old, right after I got married in 1959. I started my 1st layout in Miami, Fl. in 1960. I never had a train when I was a kid, not even under the tree. No one that lived around me had 1 either.

Larry
 
1964. I was 4 years old and had a Marklin O Scale train set with a Santa Fe E unit A-B set with a boxcar, autocarrier, gondola with container load and caboose. The track was a simple oval but was quickly expanded into an over and under figure eight.
 
I was like 12-13. My step dad put me a platform up in the basement, for my age and being 1st one it was pretty cool. 2 main line oval with x-overs, a small yard, and about 3 industries. My best friend's dad hauled junk cars on a tractor trailer so he had a space on the layout as a scrapyard and scaled trucks like his dads. I practically lived there after school!
 
Now - 58. I am still debating gauge - soon to spend a bit of money. Hope I get it right. Locked in (mental) battle between HO and O-27.

My dad used to run some of the American Flyer "S" gauge every year under the Christmas tree. Even then it wasn't very realistic but a lot of fun.
 
Lets see. I made ,on my own, my first HO scale layout when in the 5th or 6th grade. I took down my G scale 8x16 layout that my grandfater and uncle had set up for me a few years before. I put the G scale stuff in boxes and started mowing lawns to earn some $ to build my HO set. The Ho set lasted untill about 8th grade when I found a intrest in more important things... Girls ;)
about this time I took the HO layout down and turned the bacement "train room" into my bedroom. Around this time I also dabled in an N scale 4 x 8 that lasted less than a year. fast forward 10 years and My current HO layout I built when I was 25. I had just moved into my townhome and had space again for a proper layout.

Trent
 
Of course I had the trains sets as a child, one a Marx NYC set, the other from Allstate (really Marx), both .027 3 rail. I still have most of those sets. I also had an HO set, with a Warbonnet E/F unit (not sure which one it really was now).

As an adult, I started a layout in 1978 at 26 years old. I worked on it sproadically over the next 6 years until about 1984 when my son was born and it all got put into storage then.

Ths year I have retrieved it from storage and I am starting on a new layout, with a new excitement and new ideas about how to do things.

So far I am finding this forum as a great resource and a great inspiration too.
 
Let's see, I built my first Lionel layout bought with my own money from my paper route when I was 14 so that would have been 1960. I kept that until I got married and moved to California and built a new HO layout, which i kep up until I was about 25, when the job, college, marriage, and kids all came together to make model railroading fall way down in my list of priorities. I've always been a rail fan and armchair modeler though, so I never lost interest completely. Got a house now with a basement that's big enough for a dinky layout that keeps me happy, so it was age 25 to age 61 between layouts.
 
My grandfather worked for the Wabash/N&W/NS and my great uncle worked for the UP out of Laramie so I was a train nut from an early age. I got interested in model railroading after seeing Model Railroader at the school library. My dad bought a started layout (benchwork and track) from a coworker around 1987. I replaced all of the track and wiring and did a lot of scenery work on it until I turned 16 ('91). Then driving, school, work, college, girls and marriage intervened. Finally in 2004, I moved that layout from my parents basement to my basement. Replaced the track again with flextrack, rewired and now redoing the scenery. In my 21 years of model railroading, I've had the same layout!

Keith
 
I never had a lot of room in my house to do my own layout, but I had things around, first one I really did was in 6th grade. Now I am a freshman in college and I finally have a small space available to do a shelf switching layout.

My mom and my grandpa used to do it, so I still have most of their old stuff. Its funny, my grandpa was actually going to turn the lower level of this house for a giant train room (club size), but then my parents moved in.
 
For what would qualify as a hobbist layout, I was 24 and in 1969 while living in Bangkok, Thailand. HO layout 4x16 with blocks and all... including Tyco equipment and that horrible brass track. Got out of the hobby about 4 years later while living in Virginia burbs of D.C.: lack of time, space, and MONEY. Reborn 6 years ago.
 
8 ish. Dad was never into trains. I had a basic 4x8 with two ovals, a few sidings and stuff. It was actually pretty nice considering my age at the time.
 
My Mothers' father, my Grandfather went out and bought both my cousin and I our own Lionel trains sets shortly after we were born and my father made a 4x8 layout that I had till I was about Six an then he started bring home Ulrich HO car kits from work, some guy would come around selling them and he a friend, Ray Abbott who had a younger sone Ray, would buy these kits for us and I would build a kit in the evening after school every time he would bring them home. Dad and Ray each built a Central Valley Side Door Caboose which I've always treasured as it was a Trussrod Under-frame and am running it in with my other
equipment, I still have all the the cars, most of them were from the '30's to the '50's though but that led to a small oval layout that was painted a light green with some trees on it for a couple of years but then at around age 8 I picked up a track plan book and found a plan I liked quite a bit and we built that and I ran the two Mantua kit locomotives I built on it for a number of years and had a lot of fun.

Then High School,I worked for about five years and back to College at night, the move to Coarsegold took place when I was 21 and when I was about 27 I again got the urge to unpack my old trains and I was off and running again. Buy then I had been opeating my own Photography business for awhile out of a 10x50' Mobile home I bought & lived in with little extra room for a layout but figured if I built a couple of extensions out from the wall, due to a window and drapes, I could attach a 4x8' sheet of plywood to them and fold the layout up against the wall when I wasn't running trains. That lasted for about Six months
and looking through some track planning books I again found a 4x8' layout I liked but was faced with the delima of where to put it so I expanded it to a 5'6"x9' layout or there about so I could build it to fit over the full size bed which I did and slept under it and had some fun with it but
got dismayed with the atlas track due to the lack of realism, from my stanpoint, and took all the track off, a big mistake as I did have anything to run, and started hand laying my own rail and a friend, Mark, who himself was an engineer for the SP and an excellent model railroader showed me how to build switches and believe it or not the first switch I built on my own was a three-way as I needed one, no sense picking an easy project, right?

A move took place in about 1975 up to my folks place as Dad & Mom needed my help and after a while the 5x9 monster was moved into one half of a double car garage and work again proceded on it. Well after some time and almost completely hand laying the exposed track I again became dismayed with the double track main I had planned, errounously thinking I need a double track main, without realizing it really didn't fit the time period I was modeling.

My father passed away in 1989 and some time passed but I again started doing more planning and came up with a a free-lanced 10'x10' track plan that I liked quite a bit with a single track mainline with passing sidings and built a portion of it as an around the wall layout.

Then 9-11 takes place and my thoughts change from RR to Defense of the country and my priorties change for about two years but I get back into working on the existing portion I had built which gave me some running ability up and down Ridgecrest Grade. After I got to looking the situation over I realized that if I dismanteled the old layout, which still took up the majority of the rest of that side of the garage, I would have a complete 10'x21' area to expand the new layout into and that is where I am at now and working on getting it going as I have several tables up but need to build several more to
complete the table work.

So I gues the short answer would have been from a very young age and have been involved
most of my life in the hobby.
 
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I think I was born with a train just out the hospital window because I've been doing it since I can remember... hmmmm
I had a small layout before I could walk, and drove my first train before I could drive a car! (SW1500 on the CPR Winnipeg Beach line)
Some pretty cool answers here, lots of great memories!
 
Dad had built many rolling stock kits and had a 2-8-8-2. In 1967 he built a layout in the attic and we had to crawl to work on it. I was 5 and got to put the cars back on track in the low far away areas.

Before he went on deployment in the 70s and the attic was raised for a bedroom he took the trains apart. He set me up a 4x8 table and gave me the trains and said enjoy before he left.

So I would say I was about 12 and I had that layout til we moved in 1979

In 1980 I built a 4x8 layout in a common basement space in the quarters we lived in for a year.

I had a 4x8 layout in 1987 once I was married but that lasted a year because we moved.

So I guess I was about 12 at first and then a rebirth at 41. Just hope I get to keep them at this point.

Remember to have fun, while you can.
The trains got packed and I worked on building my collection and building kits until about 5 years ago. I built a building and put my 24x24 layout in the 24x32 room in the upstairs.

I had things going well and everything is on hold at this point because of problems at home.

Dad and I get together and he is amazed at the size of the layout and the amount of time I have put into it. I like the building and fixing and detailing. I like to walk in and be the electrician or the carpenter or the detailer whatever suits me that evening.
Dad walks in and says I want to run trains!!!! He makes up trains and runs them all around and tests the cars I am refitting with new kadees and trucks.

He loves it when I take out some of the ones he built 40 years ago. He says hey these are the ones I gave you to start out with.
 



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