Your childhood layout

I didn't have trains of my own as a boy, and certainly no track plan of my own, not even one spread out on the floor to crawl around and establish.

So, 50 years later, as an adult who decided to dive headfirst into our bobby, I established this track plan for my first-ever layout, begun in 1995. OGR was kind enough to come take a look at it and publish it in a few Runs.

It is this plan that has kept me engrossed in having and running trains, in all the attendant craftwork involved, and in sharing the joy of model trains with guests in our home. My wife is equally enthusiastic about my involvement with trains, which has made all the difference.

FrankM

Frank, not a bad layout for your first try   Your layout is fantastic and the attention to detail that you have paid to your creation is second to none. 

JD2035RR posted:

Frank, not a bad layout for your first try   Your layout is fantastic and the attention to detail that you have paid to your creation is second to none. 

Thank you, JD, I appreciate your including me among such good company. We have seen some wonderful layouts via OGR Forum and the OGR magazine, so I have gotten a big kick out of what you have said here about my layout. Thanks again.

FrankM

My parts box didn't seem to have any wire longer than a couple of feet. The colors and the splices made the underside look like a real rats nest, but it ran great.

The board was from my brother's Marx layout that dad and I expanded to a little larger than 4X8 by adding plywood pieces on two sides. Instead of legs, we used four shipping boxes from Friden calculators, so the table was really solid. After running my American Flyer Franklin through a closed switch and watching it hit the floor, we installed short Masonite guard rails.

5x9 layout with 2 loops. The outside was Super-O, the inside O27. The inside loop had a siding for my sawmill and coal loader. Great fun.

I am fortunate to have video from the 50s and 60s......watch from 2 minutes till the end.....

Peter

I don't have the track plan for my first permanent layout my dad and I built starting when I was 12, but it was ultimately 16x24 with two yards, four loops of track on two levels where the two outer loops could be switched to make it one long main.  The 11 track yard was able to hold 11-8 passenger cars per track.  It was an HO layout.

I have sketched various layouts over the years and here are a few of my more fun ones:

Peter, Great film of your train layout!!  We didn't have any cameras, much less a movie camera, until I got a Kodak Instamatic around the time I got my train. 

We didn't have trains at home.   I asked but Dad said they were too expensive for a Christmas gift.  His usual recommendation was, Save your money and buy it yourself.  I do not know how long I saved, but finally when I was about 12, (maybe 1968) he drove me clean down to Trainorama on Sawmill Run Blvd in the South of Pittsburgh.  That was quite a trek from Butler County in the north before the Interstate highway.  I got a Tyco HO set with an F7 and 3 cars I think and a caboose.  Well, Mum wouldn't let me keep it on the floor, so I asked about getting a sheet of plywood.  Save your money.  Finally I got the plywood and set it on a big table in the basement that had a collection of odds and ends dating back to the 1880s when Great Grandpa built the house.  By then I knew how to use hand tools, and built a rudimentary frame for the plywood out of old floorboards from the living room that had been replaced a few years earlier.  Dad never threw anything out.  (As an aside, I spent three days last week at the house and out buildings going through stuff, setting aside what to keep, and what to have the salvage folks haul away.

So the layout itself started as an oval on HO track and a couple of sidings.  Later, I used the cookie cutter method I had learned from an old copy of the Lynn Westcott HO Railroad That Grows book out of the mid '50s.  By this time I was in high school, which was the very early '70s.  I bought a couple more cars, but never had much money in it.  I worked on it and ran trains until I finished two-year college in 1976.  At that point, I got a job in Richmond and tore the layout down, packing the trains an buildings away.  A few years later, I got them out only to discover the plastic had gotten soft in the heat.  I threw everything out except a silly looking olive green Western Maryland flat car I still have.  

I have a few photographs I wanted to scan, but I can't find the album right now.  We moved too many times since I got married.