First childhood layout

My first effort at a "permanent" layout was in HO scale sometime in 1962. It was a simple oval with an alternate route and maybe a spur or two. It was built upon a folding ping-pong table down in our basement. I recall getting some Life-Like (it wasn't!) ballast in place on some of it, as well as Life-Like (they weren't!) lichen trees.

Was it a good layout?

Nope.

Did I have fun with it?

You bet! Still have the memories as you can see above! Oddly, I can still remember the distinctive "pleasant" smell of the Life-Like lichen. (How does our mind do that??)

Andre

My first layout was built by my father, who was very good with tools, when I was about 10 years old.

It consisted of a 4 by 8 foot plywood board on saw horses, and he stapled grass paper on the top of the plywood board. Then he built a beautiful trestled 027 layout using the Lionel graduated trestle set. The layout was an over and under design with 2 or 3 sidings that had illuminated bumpers. It also had 2 or 3 remote control switch tracks and 1 or 2 remote control  track sections for uncoupling and unloading operating milk, log and barrel cars.

Power was, of course, supplied by a ZW, and accessories included the barrel ramp, milk platform, and little black bin for dumping logs into, and operating cattle car and corral. We also had the rotary beacon and the animated news stand (my mother's favorite).

The layout remained in a nook under the basement stairs for 3 to 4 years.

Trains and motive power was all Postwar Lionel: Greenball Express freight set with 2065 baby Hudson, 626 B & O Centercab diesel, 41 diesel switcher, and we also ran the bump and run gang car and yellow trolley. Both my parents loved the trains as much as I did.

Before that layout, trains ran around the Christmas tree.

Arnold

When we were very young my father would put up his Lionel train around the Christmas tree.  When he was five my younger brother got a train set for Christmas.  I got mine the next year, and my father built a train board in the basement with separate loops for each of our trains.  One loop was O gauge and two were Super O.  We were not allowed to run the trains though except when he was there, so it did not get used much.  Looking back I am guessing he thought they were too expensive to trust a 6 and 8 year old to play with unsupervised.  Within a year the layout was gone and trains went back to a Christmas only thing until I was 12 and my father started letting us set up track on the floor of our bedroom.

3x4 1/2"-3/4" plywood with 2 wheels to help it go under the bed and carpeted bottom after a while. Heavy, I'd pry it up and roll it out with the rope handle over a Tonka's cab sometimes.

Passengers were a big bucket of small hard plastic army men from a comic book ad, a few gerbils, and a crazy parakeet that rode everything from forks at breakfast to the ceiling fan   No passenger cars, just lots of open air troop movements on gondolas, hoppers, flats and work cabooses

The room at the next house was long and narrow. Now it's wheels didn't allow easy bed-side eaccess, nor a roll down a hall, out to the living room. A pita. It became a filler piece for a window air-conditioner and stayed there for a decade or more?? Could still be there, it was a monster unit for a window shaker and a small house too.

That layout saw a huge variety of power supplies over time and a turnout swap to my present day 1122s (4). 

I've said I thought I had Marx track 0-29 I.dia to go around 0-27 kinda tight, and I think it came off this.(On a shelf now maybe...I did have some semetry issues I blamed on a 5 wall room's base squareness without checking.)  My curved pulp paper tunnel is for Lionel full O but it used to fit over this 0-27 profiles outer loop just fine. (too wide an arc for 0-27, too tight on 0-36, and NOT tall heavy O track. 

First true layout?  I grew up with what became a 16x24 attic layout in HO that my dad mostly built when I was 12.  I helped some, mostly in my teen years adding some scenery, reworking some track, doing some additional wiring and being more involved with adding the south wing which was a 9 track stub end terminal.  I enjoyed it even though we never finished it because I was running 100 car freight trains and 9-12 car passenger trains. 

My dad's trains were always a little nicer than mine.  He had Roco built Altas locomotives than ran really smooth, while my trains ended up to be mostly Athearn.  No complaints though.  He ran Western Maryland while I was running my typical PRR and Jersey Central.  Mostly Jersey Central then.  That road is much more common in HO and N than in O.

I have some horrible pictures of it on film I need to dig out and scan.  

This is the earliest photo of me playing with trains and the first train I drew.

My father believed in overbuilding.  Our train table stood about a foot off the ground, 4 x 8 5/8" plywood, 1 x 4 frame, six thick 4 x 4 legs.  Supported Fleischmann HO, Lionel and a variety of slot car tracks over the years.  It was strong enough that I used it as a basement drum riser in high school... 

Mitch 

My dad built my first layout when I turned 8 in 1970, as a Christmas present. It was HO, a 4X8 main table with a 4X6 "L" for a fiddle  yard. It was two tracks and two levels, the outer loop went up and over the inner. I had a long suspension bridge that spanned the lower. I ran this layout for years until we took it apart to build a bigger 12X8, also HO.

My first set of trains was ironically a Lionel HO Santa Fe passenger set with a Alco A B and 5 streamline coaches.

He had post war Lionel's that we never really ran. I had ton's of HO stuff so I never really got to set them up.

Fond memories for sure.