October 5th, 2015 marked the end of my layout. It was just over 10 years old. I spent a lot of time changing it and working on the scenic aspect over those many years. Then my father passed and we had to move my mother into our house. The only space possible was the ground floor in the family room. That meant the layout was disassembled and the room was divided up into a full size handicapped bathroom, bedroom, kitchen and living room.
Everything except the engines went into the attic.
My mother passed 22 months after moving in with us and my planning for a new layout started in November of 2017. Then as life tosses curves in December a few days after Christmas the largest bad news struck again. When you breach 50 you still think life is going to be kind however my wife was diagnosed with breast cancer. The fight of our lives now started. I didn't even think trains.
For the next 17 months I had one goal my wife. After 28 weeks of chemo two surgeries and prayers my wife beat it. She was declared cancer free in May of 2018. Over the next year and a half the trains never crossed my mind except for the very small Christmas display each year. I just spent time with my wife. I will add she is still cancer free as of today.
So now is the time to start thinking trains. Over the past several weeks I started bringing down everything. I have completely filled up one of our 4 bedrooms with all of my train items. My god when did I buy all that stuff? 35 engines split about even between steamers and diesel. 600 pieces of rolling stock, a lot I didn't even remember having. Everything in a box, try finding room for all of that. Enough track to circle the globe. More buildings than I care to have. DCS, TMCC, transformers and I had no memory of the amount of Lionel 180 power bricks and MTH 100 bricks I had. In any event I have more than I can possible use in building my new layout. So there is the larger problem. Designing a much smaller layout. To be honest I'm not sure I really want to put all the work into landscaping etc.
So to get an idea of what I want I am going to build a temporary floor Christmas layout. My plan is to start the weekend after Christmas. At the present I have no track plans in my head. I think I just might start laying track and see where it leads me. I'm not in a hurry to come up with a track plan. With retirement still far in the distance I have years to get what I want done with it. Who knows I might even get the bug to start considering doing the scenic part of the layout too. But to be honest I just want to run some trains everyday if I want like the old days.
I have about 20 x 15 of floor space for the Christmas floor layout. So i should be able to come up with an exciting layout for Christmas this year.
