What For You Is The Most Enjoyable Part of Model railroading?


Greg@mnrr

Greg@mnrr

Section Hand
I enjoy construction (the bench work, track work, wiring and scenery) as the most enjoyable part(s) of model railroading. Second for me is running trains and doing some one person operations and switching.

What do you find to be the most enjoyable part of model railroading?

Thanks.

Greg

PS: I also enjoy meeting a lot of great people.
 
All the successes. Getting track laid well. Getting the wiring right. Running the first train around the system. Improving the scenery. Getting brilliant new ideas. Running trains. The variety needed to keep the layout and hobby interesting. Getting a new loco. Fixing a locomotive or improving its performance or looks. Building a credible structure either from scratch or from a kit. Showing my accomplishments to a friend or a visitor. My wife's encouragement. Sharing it all with my grandsons.

I could go on.
 
There are a lot of things to enjoy about the hobby. I grew up with the railroads so I got hooked at an early age.

I have been puttering around with my layout for nearly 30 years. There were long periods when I went for a period of a few years and didn't even go into the train room because where I live we don't have any hobby shops making it extremely hard to get anything done. When internet retailers became more numerous I was able to move forward.

Now I have finally been able to get all of the track down, probably over 90% of the scenery done and have probably more than enough locomotives and rolling stock, I am finally able to operate the way it was designs for, mainly switching. I did enjoy many phases of construction. Scenery. Learned a lot as I hardly had a clue when I started it. Scratch building. Never did that before either. After a few structures, it almost became second nature and it was a lot of fun to build structures to fit into particular spaces.

Custom Painting. Never held an air brush before in my like until I decided that I would freelance and wanted to custom paint my locomotives and freight cars.

Weathering. Never did that before either. Why would anyone want to screw up a perfectly good looking freight car? I don't go into heavy weathering, but do like having equipment look like it has been around for a while. I got to the point where I wouldn't put anything on the layout until it was weathered to some degree. Years ago I used to go up to Great Falls, MT during state fair and help the model railroad club up there for their open house during fair hours. Brought my weathered equipment down there and the club members heard numerous comments on how the cars looks so real. All of the club members cars were not weathered. The next year, almost everyone had weathered cars and locomotives.

I can now enjoy operating the the layout the way it was designed, I'll go down to the train room to do some minor work on the layout and in a lot of cases nothing gets done because I am running trains and enjoying every moment of it.

There are just so many things about the hobby that I enjoy.
 
I enjoy the scenery and making the track flow like you would see it in the real world but at the same time I enjoy building structures.
 
For me I think it would be as follows:

1. The build of the layout
2. The scenery

Everything else comes somewhere beneath those two preferences in terms of what is the "most enjoyable". Obviously I like watching the trains run but that should be a given.
 
Right now Im enjoying the electronics side of things. We installed a signal system at my club last year and all the electronic and computer stuff is really adding to the layout. JMRI has been a big part of the project and Operations has made the layout feel like a real railroad instead of a round and round circle track.
 
D&J RailRoad said:
Watching others participating in an ops session on my empire.
Click to expand...
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What he said.

...except mine's not an 'empire', just an urban switching layout. But it keeps 6 operators occupied for 3 hours.

I also have fun preparing the switchlists & manifests, then rehearsing the planned train movements in advance.
 
Tough question. I enjoy almost all aspects of model railroading, especially building things. Crandell's post sums it up very nicely for me. It is easier for me to list the only two things that I dislike about the hobby, soldering and tree-making!

Willie
 
Living where I do, i don't get much opportunity to help others with Model Railroading. I do help out at the Food Shelf, however!
 
Well, let me see. I had three most enjoyable moments.

one it was my mother who introduced me to ERIE RR and the world of model railroading back in the mid to late 1960’s.

two it was my mother and I it was back in the 1990's that my mother were discussing after she designed a CATERPILLAR powered locomotive

the third was when my mother and I built my last train N-SCALE layout which was loosely based on two ERIE RR’s Divisions, She built the towns as I laid the track this was back in 1987 - 1997.

BCK RR
 
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