09-04-2009, 10:22 AM
tv_man Wrote:Probably someone has brought this up already ad nauseum, but I just can't keep this knowledge for myself. Model railroading is said to be an expensive hobby. I guess it is true, but then it can be as costly as one wants it to be. A casual bystander might walk into a model railway store and see some some price tags on some of the prettiest models on display, sure, can't say that it's cheap. But what is the part of the hobby where the hidden costs lie? The electricity bill when running your basement empire 24 hours a day? The medical bill from cutting your fingers too often? Well, maybe, but how about the price of the real estate (the 1:1 kind, that is, that you need to build your empire on? Living in Helsinki, I figured that the real estate for a nice trains room of 20 square metres (about 200 square feet) in the suburbs could easily cost around $50000. That buys quite a lot of trains, don't you think? (For your information, my layout is 8 square feet)
I think the real estate prices in the metropolitan areas of Southern California are probably comparable to Europe. Most large model railroads in North America are built in basements, but we generally don't have basements in California. I suspect that in California (probably in the rest of the South part of the U.S.) the most popular place to build a model railroad is the garage. The cost of real estate is the driving factor behind me designing an "L" shaped switching layout on a couple of walls of a spare bedroom rather than trying to build a large model railroad that models a class 1 going across country.