ISLs ..Coming Of Age?

[Russ Bellinis]

I don't know if my plans will result in saving money or not. I belong to a modular club where I can run anything I want to run in HO standard gauge. I would like to join the La Mesa Club at the San Diego Model Railroad Museum in the near future if I can fit the time into my schedule. That would allow me to operate on their Tehachapi layout. For my home layout, I suspect that I'm not in an unusual situation for most people living in the Southwest. We generally don't have basements out here. Our utilities are run 4 feet under the street, so a basement would not only be an expensive dig, but would also require some sort of elaborate sump pump/anti backflow valve system to keep it from flooding in a storm. I have a 3 bedroom 2 bath home of 1400 square feet that was recently enlarged to @1800 sq. ft. I have the smallest spare bedroom that will be my "man cave/train room/model building room." It has room for a 7 foot x 9 foot "L" shaped layout on two walls and one corner. My house would probably appraise for $450k now. 2 years ago it appraised for $600k. Fortunately my mortgage is only around $400k so I'm not upside down yet, and it looks like property values in the Los Angeles Metro area are climbing. There are about 40-50 members of the modular club and at least half maybe three quarters of them have no home layout at all. If I lived in an outlying area like Gary does in Texas I might be able to build an out building to house a model railroad, but living in the city, I just don't have enough land.

Foirtunately, I discovered after joining the modular club that a few laps around an oval no matter how big gets old after about 2 or 3 laps, and I start looking for industries to switch.