ThWHAT- is/was your "ultimate goal" when you found yourself with a "Hankering" for MRR?
I have never been in the position to find myself faced with this new thing called model railroading, I having had trains the entire memory of my life. I can't answer the "when I found" part. I am certain even as I child that I had goals either explicit or subconscious, but through all that time I have developed an "ultimate goal".
At one time I've probably had all the goals that most everyone has as they mature in the hobby:
I had a goal to have a permanent layout rather than sectional track strewn across the floor.
I had a goal to have a dual track main line.
I had a goal to have some scenery.
I had a goal to have a basement empire.
To exactly model a prototypical locomotive.
etc.
In junior high I started noticing this model railroad that appeared often in the magazines called the V&O. No matter how much I read about it, I could not figure out if it was a real railroad or not. In fact, some of the articles I couldn't tell if they were written about a model or a real thing. Many years (Decades) later I learned the real story of the V&O. And there in is my goal. I want to develop a model railroad that is so believable in all aspects (scenery, theme, era appropriateness, roster, rolling stock, operations, backstory, and longevity) that for anything published about it, a general reader would not know if it was a model or real.
The Goal is to have a model railroad that is so good it has its own historical society.