Model Railroading Headway
As I get older and as my health demands more sedentary hobbies, I've been squeezing in more and more model railroading to fill in for some more physically demanding activities that I've needed to drop from my life.
I've written before about plans for converting a room in the house to a "train room". This room already houses all my trains on shelves but I intend to someday start building a good sized O scale model railroad layout. When I've written about this in the past, I shared some preliminary plans for this layout.
This layout runs around the walls and will be designed around some custom shelving units. I purposely designed this layout so that I'll still have access to a walk-in closet and a workbench/desk. The plan is coming together.
Since the weather has not been allowing me to work on the house, I've been doing more and more sketching of ideas as rest on the couch. The plan really is coming along and it seems to be a very realistic plan with a city area, a more rural industrial area, and a great selection of bridges.
I hope to build all the buildings and bridges myself. The buildings need to be in some very specific sizes so designing and building these buildings myself is the way to go. This will also save significantly on cost too. I already even have design ideas in my head for each and every building and bridge on this layout...
In the meantime, I continue to find great deals on used trains and collect more and more of the type of trains that will fit this layout plan. Online auctions have been my friend!
Part of the hobby involves customizing and repairing and I have plenty of repairs and customization to do on each of these trains.
My favorite steam locomotive needed a little bit of repair work after Lukey crashed the locomotive, ripping the bell off the model. I tackled this repair this morning.
I had ordered this bell online a number of months ago. I needed to drill the old bell stem out of the heavy locomotive housing first. This morning, I accomplished carefully drilling this hole in the locomotive. Then I needed to cut the long stem off the new cast bell... then grind down parts to fit... now I have a new bell!
The frame of this bell still needs to be painted black but it already looks far better than it looked without a bell! Actually, the locomotive looked sort of naked to me without the bell!
It is nice to have hobbies and I enjoy this one!
I've written before about plans for converting a room in the house to a "train room". This room already houses all my trains on shelves but I intend to someday start building a good sized O scale model railroad layout. When I've written about this in the past, I shared some preliminary plans for this layout.
This layout runs around the walls and will be designed around some custom shelving units. I purposely designed this layout so that I'll still have access to a walk-in closet and a workbench/desk. The plan is coming together.
Since the weather has not been allowing me to work on the house, I've been doing more and more sketching of ideas as rest on the couch. The plan really is coming along and it seems to be a very realistic plan with a city area, a more rural industrial area, and a great selection of bridges.
I hope to build all the buildings and bridges myself. The buildings need to be in some very specific sizes so designing and building these buildings myself is the way to go. This will also save significantly on cost too. I already even have design ideas in my head for each and every building and bridge on this layout...
In the meantime, I continue to find great deals on used trains and collect more and more of the type of trains that will fit this layout plan. Online auctions have been my friend!
Part of the hobby involves customizing and repairing and I have plenty of repairs and customization to do on each of these trains.
My favorite steam locomotive needed a little bit of repair work after Lukey crashed the locomotive, ripping the bell off the model. I tackled this repair this morning.
I had ordered this bell online a number of months ago. I needed to drill the old bell stem out of the heavy locomotive housing first. This morning, I accomplished carefully drilling this hole in the locomotive. Then I needed to cut the long stem off the new cast bell... then grind down parts to fit... now I have a new bell!
The frame of this bell still needs to be painted black but it already looks far better than it looked without a bell! Actually, the locomotive looked sort of naked to me without the bell!
It is nice to have hobbies and I enjoy this one!
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