Past Layouts |
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 Probably
the times in my life when I was happiest was when I was going for train rides or reliving
them as dad and me were working on yet another "permanent" layout. We’d put
a stack of LPs on the stereo, I would sing and dad would whistle, as we worked on the
layouts together. I helped put lots of plastic house kits together when I was younger. I
was too little to mess with the glues and paints and x-acto knives back then, but I helped
dad by finding the parts he needed next. I did lots of crawling under the layout to pull
wires through little holes by the switch machines and then poke the other ends through the
holes at the control panel. |
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| The last really cool layout my dad and I worked on together was a 4’x8’ cookie cutter double figure 8 design which me modified from a plan we found in an Atlas construction manual. Inside one of the halves of the 8 was a turntable with roundhouse, and in the other half a "Y" turnaround with a coal mine operation. |
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| The Y in our layout was up a level and covered almost the entire one end of the tracks below, thus giving us a nice tunnel. And of course there were a couple bridges as well. For me a layout simply isn’t complete without lots of tunnels and bridges and turntables and rail yards and a stock pens full of cattle and a roadside diner with neon lights and ……. Before we had all the scenery finished my dad had an accident at work which resulted in him messing up his legs and feet pretty bad. He spent the next couple years in and out of hospitals, wheel chairs, and on and off crutches. And it seemed that the layout decided to breakdown with him. Trains started derailing in the tunnels, the turntable developed a short somewhere that wouldn’t let you drive the engines in and out of the roundhouse, and so on and so forth. Since dad couldn’t help with it, my heart just sort of went out of it as well and a year or so later it was dismantled. |
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We still had trains up and running each year at Christmas
though. I can’t begin to tell you the number of train sets my father bought over the
years. Some for  me,
some for himself, and some for the whole family to enjoy. We had a stray cat living with
us one Christmas until we could find her a good home. And that year we had a new Lionel
train set up on our pool table in our middle-room. This crazy kitty loved to lay right in
the middle of the table and watch the train run around, all the while she’s purring
up a storm and her tail is swinging in the breeze. She used to hide and sometimes would
sleep in the Styrofoam tunnel. |
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| We’ve been up and down through the numerous toy train scales many times throughout the years. My father grew up with "S" scale American Flyers. At the same time my uncle Eddie was playing with "O-27" Lionel and Marx sets. Both of my dad's brothers also got hooked into trains and had "HO" layouts set up for Christmas. Besides these scales we’ve also played around with N and G scale trains over the years. |
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| (NOTE: My uncle Eddie did a really cool thing that I've passed on to numerous model railroaders. You can sometimes get trains of the same scale with different types of couplers. In Eddie's case it was Lionel and Marx. So, he took two train cars and simple swapped a set of trucks/wheel-sets on each. This gave him two cars with a set of two different couplers. This way he could mix and match different engines and rolling stock without having to worry about the incompatibility. This trick can also be used in N,Z,HO,G,etc. If you have a lot of rolling stock and can't afford to convert all the cars to the same coupler type all at once, you can make some "in-between" cars to help out in the meantime. This was actually done many times to mix both narrow-gauge and standard-gauge train cars. ) |
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I still have a picture of the very first layout I helped
build. And I did all the scenery myself. The train was an O-27 Marx set that I purchased
with Green  Stamps. It
only had a small oval of track - just two pieces of straight and 8 curve - so the layout
wasn’t very big. But our Christmas tree stood in the center, with a cotton
"snow" cover hiding the trunk. Around the snow "mountain" my little
plastic green army guys had set up camp with a couple of their trucks. I built a switch
tower out of plastic bricks, a station out of Lincoln logs, a little metal log cabin bank
was just the right size and fit in a corner nicely. I’m still pretty proud of this
layout, I wasn’t real good with the saw and I couldn’t hammer the nails
straight, but I built all the structures and landscaped the thing all by myself. Not bad
for a 5-6 year old. |
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| One time I had several 0-27 Lionel sets and had a nice 4’x8’ layout for Christmas, with that wonderful cardboard "fake brick" paper around the base to hid all the empty boxes and wires and such. My uncle Ed had it around his layouts as well. |
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(NOTE: This brick paper went around almost every layout at Christmas. Oddly, it seems the winter holidays is only time of the year that stores stock it.) |
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 Eddie
had two 4’x’4 layouts pushed together, with a "square" of track on
each. I believe I saw photos of a time when he had one layout at each end of a sofa, one
with a Christmas tree and the other without. He also found it easier to move them in and
out of storage by himself with the smaller sizes. We always went to my aunts and uncles on
New Years Day and dad and uncle Ed would watch the football games on TV. I wanted to run
the trains but I couldn’t until the games were over because they made too much noise
and put fuzzy lines on the TV screen. My aunt Ruthie noticed I was board later in the day
and when asked why I wasn’t playing with the trains. I answered because the
ball game was on. She noted that if we waited for the ball games to get finished I might
not get a chance to play at all, so phooey on them, she and I were going to play with the
trains and have some fun. My aunt was a pretty good engineer but one train came off the
track for some reason, sparks flying like they do. I pointed this out, but she kept
turning up the power anyway and soon we smelled something burning. One of the wires that
ran from the track to the transformer was against the brick paper and the wire got so hot
from the "short" that it started to toast the paper. |
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blah blah blah |
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Anyway, back to my layout that year. Around this time sand art had become a raving fad, especially during the summer. Every fair and carnival you went to had sand art stands. My dad was always into crafts and arts things, so we even got into this art form pretty seriously for a while there. But by this Christmas either the fad was wearing thin or the weather just wasn’t right for playing in the sand, so several stores had their colored sand marked down really cheap to get rid of the remaining summer stock. I got the brilliant idea to us sand for my scenery medium. Green for grass, brown for country roads, black for town roads, and so forth. Believe me it took a lot of sand. A bag full just didn’t go very far. (Remember it was 4’x8’ in size.) I even went as far as to staple plastic down first, then dump the sand all over everything, thinking that later I could vacuum it up and we could reuse most of it. But when I started dumping on the sand, the piles had to be pretty thick to hide the plastic underneath. And even though the sand was grossly discounted, I couldn’t buy enough of it to do the entire project. Next idea was to color my own sand. So my uncle Ed got us some sand at the quarry that he worked at and I bought a gallon of dark green paint. I mixed everything together (we had books of this subject - when dad gets involved with a craft or hobby, he goes all the way) and then left it to dry. Oddly enough this worked OK, but I would need still more sand and more paint and time was running out. We always started decorating for Christmas over Thanksgiving, and then took everything down sometime in January. So, I ended up painting the layout with matching colored paint and then sprinkling on the matching colored sand when the paint was still wet. That year we also made little wooded ties to glue down between the ones already attached to the silver rails. I used dried coffee grounds for ballast between the rails. I had lots of Plasticville houses. Dad and his oldest brother Arthur both said my houses looked funny because the lights inside made the entire building glow. Taking my red roofed-white walled fire station for an example, it had an overall nice pink glow to it. They told me how they used to cut black construction paper and glue it inside all their houses, even overlapping the paper in corners, so the only light shining came through the windows. For me I liked everything the way it was, this was a make believe village with a warm Christmas like atmosphere. It was toy trains and toy people and toy houses, so the "toy" look just brought everything together. And besides, with the lights out it really looked super cool. |
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