On July 2, 1982 I started assembling L-Girders to build my layout. At the end of that day I had the outside walls of my 26X46 foot basement covered with L-Girders to start construction. The benchwork was textbook Linn Westcott. I studied his book for a long time. I changed things a bit covering the joists with 5/8 plywood and that was covered by 1/2 inch Homosote glued and screwed. My track of choice was Lionel and K-Line tubular track. I would do it again. To this day 34 years later, I have never had one screw back out of the Homosote.
On December 24, 1982 I finished the first loop of track and the first train to run that day was my Eliot Welz Metroliner. I still have the train. As time marched on, I installed many feet of track and things started to take shape. The layout was used by Barry Lewis and myself to do product reviews for OGR. Lionel approached me to use the layout to test a new operating system they were working on. People from Lionel came several times and spent a few days testing. The system was TMCC and helping Barry, the first article on TMCC was in OGR.
+After a period of time I started to get many people who wanted to see the layout being worked on. Working the 4-12 shift on the Police Department, I would come home at midnight and work until I got tired. Sometimes that would be an hour and other times I would see the sun come up.
I made a good friend early on at York of Mike Wolf. After the TMCC, he approached me to use my layout to test his new DCS system. Mike made many trips to my house and I had to learn the system and learn how to make it work on my common ground buss wired layout. Things went slow until I (by accident) I found what is known today as the magic light bulb trick. It was all upstream then. With Barry Lewis, we had the very first article on DCS in OGR.
One main goal I always had was fully operating catenary. About 16 years ago I worked on that and made it happen. I have several hundred feet of live catenary. I have a large fleet of electric locomotives and none of them have pickup rollers under them.
Over the years I have had many people visit and my layout and it is always open to any OGR member and family. A few years back, I got very bad prostate cancer and I thought I was ready for the last run on the layout. All my good OGR friends helped me and kept me in the fight. The owners and workers at OGR called constantly to see how I was doing. Jim Barrett stayed in touch with Dotty. Thank you very much Jim. Thank you one and all. The trains are still running and so am I at this point.
Many pictures have been posted and many have signed my layout wall. If people want, I can post pictures of some of those great people. It has been a great run and I achieved the goal I had in mind when I started. I tell people not to cheap out on benchwork and electronics.
My layout is a toy train layout with scale trains. If you find yourself in my area, please contact me. My email is in my profile and I am in the phone book.
Thank you everyone.
and here is to another 34 years!! Thank you for sharing your story with all of us here!
Happy 34th to your layout and best wishes to you as well! 
