Despite all manner of problemson my own layout and projects on hold around the house, for the past eleven weeks I have worked on little else except building a fold-up wooden toy train layout for my grandkids, ages not yet, 2, and 4. Now called the WUTTS-UP (Wooden Unpowered Toy Train Set - Union Pacific), it's all packed up and ready to ship: UPS comes to get it in the morning and it will be at my oldest boy's home in Austin by next Tuesday.
The layout is a wooden box 36x24x8 inches that opens into the six by two foot wooden toy train layout shown below. All the track but three pieces is store bought - I cut and routed three pieces to fit. The trees and two very small buildings are also store bought. Everything else is custom made: all the buildings, cranes, accessories, etc. I included seven store- bought locomotives with the set, but four were repainted in Union Pacific livery. Rolling stock was a mixture of store bought and homemade cars: in particular I could not find any good, plan old boxcars or cabeese, so I made some.
I am proud of the three cranes, one of which is a dockyard crane that rolls along/over the track up and down the container ship dockyards. Like cranes included with Brio, Thomas, and Chuggington products the ones I made will pick up small loads magnetically, including several store-bought ore loads, along with containers, oil tanks, and two giant tuna fish I made. But these homemade cranes will drop any of those loads, too, via a simple operation (mechanical, no electro-magnets involved). I couldn't see any use for a crane that could only pick up, not put down, things. I never saw that feature in the stores and it was fun to figure out and build, although it took a total of six prototypes before I got the design perfected to so-simple-a-three-year-old-can-operate-and-not-tear-it-up . . . . (I hope :-) ).
Anyway, I had a lot of fun, but never have I so underestimated the effort required on a project. I am soooo glad it is over: I thought it would never end. Tomorrow I start laying Atlas track to "replace" the corroded Fastrack on my layout in earnest.
