I have been thinking a lot lately about my current layout. And I have some doubts about some of the givens that I laid out early on.
- HO Scale
- 2 railroads on the layout
- Need to provide a sense of distance between towns, implies multiple towns
- Must have a yard
- Intermodal terminal
- Corn Syrup
- Car Cards and Waybills
- DCC
- Multiple trains per op session
- Multi person crew
With the layout in a room that is 20x11 some of these 'requirements' just don't make sense
- HO Scale. It's what I have always modeled in. It's almost too small to see as it is.
- Does having 2 railroads really add much more operational interest? Does it even make sense if I will mostly be a lone operator?
- With crews being light on the regular weekly ops sessions I realize that getting there is only fun for me if there are a bunch of other guys out on the layout. If it's just me, it's not fun.
- Yard? Why? Sure it's fun on a big layout, but again for a one man show, do I really need it?
- I love intermodal trains. But does it make sense on a small HO layout? Sure I can run small intermodal trains, so what. And do they add much interest operationally?
- Corn Syrup. Stays
- Car Card and Waybills. Stay
- DCC. Stays
- One man, one train
- Multi person crew? Doesn't seem likely
While I struggle with these questions I am still working on the layout, but not as enthusiastically as I would like. I really don't want to be one of those people who never gets a layout operational, but I have some serious doubts with my current plan.
I am considering doing something like the
Downtown Spur to either
Worcester, MA or
Washington Park.
I often wonder how people can actually get a layout complete enough to be up and running. Between all the different avenues of interest that are available to explore, and changes in perspective due to experience I don't know how I am every going to get to the point where I can run a train from one end of the layout to the other.
