Sometimes Just Thinking About This Hobby Is Good Enough.

It is just one more pleasure from this hobby.  I think a lot about projects I have down the road, often while driving actually: when cruising on the interstate on long trips I think of little else in the back of my mind.  Such thinking is both enjoyable and productive.  I've worked out a lot of plans/solved problems just thinking that way.

I spent a lot of time in airports and airplanes and did a lot of thinking about the layout and the trains that go with it. As Lee says, it is a wonderful part of our hobby.

Sure, although I've never done it with a gun in my hands.  I generally think about trains while I'm working out at the gym.

I drift off to sleep thinking about the next project on the layout.  Don't tell my family.  They already think I'm not wrapped too tight.

Yea I'm always day dreaming of what steam engine I wish I had LOL.

I used to love having lunch at a nearby Panera Bread and doodling on the napkins about what a certain train scene would look like.  Some of my best layout ideas originated there.

Art

I fall asleep at night dreaming of a layout for my big UP steamers.  Long PFE reefer and UP passenger trains gliding past huge mountains pulling long trains, just like real life.

Or, building steamers never made in brass before...  

I only have a seasonal layout- put up a giant community display in November, & take it all down in January. I have had a great time planning, thinking and building "The Next One" in my head for years. I already have next years layout improved, and this year has only been open to the public three times...

Thinking about my layout and it's next project is the only way I can fall to sleep at night.

I do 75% of my planning during the first hour I am in bed trying to fall to sleep.

Moreover, model railroading relaxes me so much and un-stresses me so much I get drowsy just watching uTube videos on model trains.

Just thinking about it would be a lot less expensive.

What, me worry?

I just recently moved and finally got the trains out again for Christmas. Now that I have them circling the tree, running for the first time in almost 9 months, my brain's been working overtime, daydreaming about the new layout I'm going to build. It's a lot of fun dreaming about future projects, and at times it helps you work out problems and figure out just how you're going to go about it.

Planning my next layout in my mind is how I drift off to sleep just about every night.

Same here. I'm either thinking about the next project or what steps I need to take for a current project I'm working on. 

Do it all the time, great for blood pressure.

All the best,

Miketg

Lucky we all are to be involved in Model Railroading. It's gotten me through, childhood, basic training, SATs, college, job relocations, all kinds of job related stress (only thing worse than being fired is doing the firing), and helped me wind through the road of life with no ulcers, no heart disease, nor any other maladies of the modern world.

Wouldn't trade the hobby for anything...well almost anything. 

When running my trains around, I think a lot about my life.

When my life runs me around, I think a lot about my trains.

Besides reading about the hobby either on websites like this or in magazines,thinking about model trains is about all I get to do other than work and normal day life..eeehhh gad I need to pick another body to inhabit

I dreamed of building fantastic layouts when I was a boy operating my train set around the Christmas tree. Then, I intermittently dreamed of them through school days, the Army, and through many work days. I suppose it's a digression, but given the drudgery that many of us have to go through in life, it could be a healthy digress.

Planning the layout of dreams is perhaps the elusive train we can never catch, such that, it's the imaginative part that is most rewarding.  JLC may have known that when Lionel created those wonderful catalog illustrations. I've built some neat layouts, but they never seem to be as fulfilling as when I dreamed and planned them.

Planning and thinking about a layout, or just planning a project, is often as pleasurable as working on it.  I really think it is a big part of what I love the hobby.  

This is in contrast to my two good friends who are so into golf.  I asked one  if he thinks about golf as often and as much as I think about trains and he replied, "You've got to be kidding.  If we do all that happens is we go over in our heads all the mistakes we made last time and how much it honked me off."

I really prefer the trains!

I recently had to have two MRI's. Being claustrophobic I hate these tests even in the so called "open" MRI's.

I spent the 30 minutes each time going over my old layouts as if I was operating the train and  also designing my new layout.

Helped a great deal.

Paul

KC,

  I'm with you whilst deer hunting in the woods, I often am thinking of the next thing to add to the layout and what to run on Friday night.  Then a deer comes by and ruins my thoughts, go figure?  Can't win.

Yep!  I daydream right at the layout even with a tool in my hand doing something and my mind wanders to what's going to be over there in the future when I get to it even with variable choices, designing in my mind.

.....

Dennis

Actually, the thinkin' part is therapeutic....and problem-solving...for moi!

Can't tell you how many times while working on a layout-related problem, making several false/wasteful/disastrous starts, staring at the gizmo that just defied my best efforts at resuscitation, etc., etc., I've ended up walking away...taking a break...

And thinking about a different solution...sometimes for several days...occasionally a few weeks...but at least for a night!....

Only to have that epiphany, Eureka!, HOLY-MOLY!, Well...DUH!!!, after thinking about it.

Of course, reading about other approaches to problems on this forum helps move the thinker-organ along,too!!

Happy Sunday....be blessed!

KD

I never daydreamed about any ultimate layout in terms of a gargantuan project. Instead I often think of impossible challenges in compression. Having grown up in a flat prairie state full of cornfields grasslands and small enclaves of communities or grain elevators, separated by appreciable distances, all of which are connected by a single thread of track..how do I get that sense of large distances on a flat surface? Thats one of many...that appeal to me in a sense of a better appreciation of less is more, versus what I have done to date. Rethinking the whole "big picture" 

What scale would work best and still be practical? My favorite roads are the Rock Island and Illinois Terminal that went through the prairies and it's a environment seldom modeled and I think this is so because urban environments, making mountains are comparatively easier..Needless to say I can see in my mind's eye a around the room layout to give a better perspective of distance. Still working on this one.

Recalling a word from olden times, "woolgathering".  I do spend a lot of time thinking about this hobby, planning track layouts, how to mesh mainlines, power supplies, lighting in passenger cars, all good stuff.  I think traingathering should replace woolgathering for me.

Yep, I daydream all the time, and sometimes get caught.  

I was in a four-hour long, end-of-year "management review" of our operations last Monday morning: end-of-year/plan for next year thing with presentations by each department manager.  I was day-dreaming and not really paying attention, when I realized I was expected to speak up and comment on a presentation that was just concluded.  A co-worker quipped, "Probably daydreaming about Lionel . . . "  He had no idea how correct he was, although actually it was 3rd Rail  . . . !