GEC's Layout Progress

[Green_Elite_Cab]

I would encourage you to have patience. Aren't you still living at home with your parents while going to school full time? Once you have finished your formal education, started on a career path, and ready to find your own home, then you can look for a home with a train room large enough to fit what you want to have. I think your basic problem right now is that you have a 4x8 space and you can't fit a 20x20 lay out into it no matter how much you try.

You're right (though school is over for the summer, thank god!). I still need to expand this yard. Its not a question of my wanting more, but i'm not even sure that yard is big enough for the trains in the pictures of the layout from the book i got it from! I don't mind still running my passenger trains in a single loop, but it would be nice to be able to operate my freight train a little more realistically. these two tracks are not enough. I've been working on a video to show my layout as it is now, and if i played it all, you'd see how frustrating it gets. It was like the Penn Central on a bad day.

the rest of that over complicated junk can go, or at least wait until another day. I think only when i finally get my own space, will i actually build a new layout from scratch.

I have a close friend here in So Cal that I think you could take a lesson from. He is probably about 5-7 years from retiring. He lives in a small typical tract home here in So Cal and works as an electrical engineer in the aerospace industry. He has bought a 5 acre property in Newport, Oregon to retire to. It has a house and a barn on the property. Right now, he rents out the house to a family, and he has a small apartment in the barn that he and his wife stay in when the go up there for 2 weeks every summer. They have been moving stuff up every summer and storing the stuff in the barn to minimize the amount of stuff they need to move when retirement day comes. When he moves up there, he will have a huge layout space in the barn to build his dream layout. Right now, he has a 4x8 in his covered patio. He is building models to use on the ultimate layout, and has enough locomotives that he could not possibly fit them all on all of the track on the 4x8. His plan is to model Philadelphia where he grew up, and he models Conrail & CSX with models in paint for Pennsy, Reading, C&O, B&O, CSX, Conrail Blue, and probably a few others that I have forgotten. I think his eventual plan is to include some Septa under catenary as well.

Sounds like an awesome set up in the works. I bet i could give him some lessons myself! I'd love to see his stuff if he is going to model SEPTA. I to have been collecting, its just that i figured i had space and maybe a little time. I already have several structure kits so i feel ready to build, but you're right, if i do it now, i'll loose the game in the long term