Thoughts About Model Railroading and Layouts

I have not managed to post anything o the blog in the last month. To be honest, in  this time, I haven't interacted at all with the world of model railroading. I've let my subscriptions to Model Railroader and Railroad Model Craftsman lapse, and have not spent much time looking at model railroad blogs, at least compared to how much time I used to spend. I'll try to explain why this is.

For the past eight months, I have not quite had an active layout project. I dismantled the Norway, Maine layout that I had built over the summer during last October, when I moved houses. While I have since written a fair amount on this blog, most of it has been largely inconclusive stuff about half-baked layout design ideas that have not lasted a week even as a working plan, much less gotten to something approaching layout construction. While I started something in November and again in January, they were in fact very bad ideas and I'm not quite sure why I started working on them, other than that I was impatient with armchair model railroading. I also have constructed a few scratchbuilt structures, but on the whole I was rather inactive.

From late February to around now, I've been even less involved in model railroading. Recently, I came very close to quiting the hobby, before realizing that I had no other ideas as to what to do, though, to be honest, I have no real idea what to do in the hobby - which is why I'm writing this post. But I digress. At any rate, I allowed the blog to lapse and haven't done anything model railroading related for the last two months. I cleaned the storage room that my trains inhabit (more on that later, perhaps), and spent a bit of time reading model railroad blogs, but that was the extent of my involvement with the hobby. To illustrate the extent that I've been inactive, this time included an eleven day spring break, seven days of which were spent at or around home, so there was no shortage of time that I could have worked on a layout. I didn't even manage to post wordless Wednesdays. 

I earlier mentioned that I let my model railroad magazine subscriptions expire without bothering to renew them. Much ink (can you call it that on the internet?) has been spilled online about the deaths of model railroading magazines. I suppose I should feel some regret for contributing to their demise, but I really don't feel any regrets about ending the subscriptions. Model Railroader, particularly, was not worth money. I had found nothing useful in it for over a year, and its approach of showing only huge layouts and its attitude of sort of looking down on and dismissing small layouts and modelers who don't have a 1000 square foot basement was really bothering me. But no one reads this blog to listen to me rant about Model Railroader, so I'll move on.

In the house that I moved to about six months ago, there isn't much space available to build a layout in. The extent of the space is an eleven foot long wall in a storage room that is stuffed very full. But the length of eleven feet is very deceiving. In reality, there is a five r six foot long picture window in the center of the wall, and one end of the wall is rendered mostly useless because it must store a table saw. Even if the saw wasn't there, it wouldn't be useful space as the wall adjoining it has wall length sliding doors to a closet that has to have full access. So in practice, I only have a 42 inch by maybe 3 foot corner that is just wall space. So I have no idea how I might fit a layout into the space, even if I knew something to model. Which I don't. I Some might suggest that I build a layout along a bedroom wall, but in my case that would have to be in my bedroom and his much many of the same problems as the storage room. And at any rate, I may enjoy the hobby but I would rather not live in close proximity to my layout. I'd rather not have a heavy assembly of flammable construction materials permanently installed in my bedroom, to be honest.

Besides the fact that I have no idea whatsoever as to what to model (which isn't quite true, either something in Maine or something on CP Rail), I can't come up with any sort of layout design ideas for a layout either. I've looked around at various parts of the internet, but that has come up with little. Many, but certainly not all (and no one my blog links to), online who suggest ideas for what to do if one does not have much layout space, seem to operate on the assumption that anyone can procure a eight or ten foot long wall free from obstruction. In my experience, that's not realistic. Now that I have fairly limited space, I'd love to have an eight foot long wall. These layout design pundits, especially in the US, seem to think that eight feet of fixed layout plus four or five feet of staging space is standard for everyone to have. In the US, there seems to be no recognition that model railroaders could not have an empty wall available to them for any purpose that they desire. 

The traditional advice that would be offered to a hobbyist in a situation like what I find myself in would be to either be an armchair model railroader and build and collect models for a future mega-layout, but, realistically, that's never going to be a reality in my life, and besides, I want a layout to work on at this point in time, not in a future that will never come. The other option that might be presented would be to build a module. Traditional modules have no appeal to me as the standards are overly restrictive and lead to unrealistic models. Free-mo might be appealing but A) my 'local' free-mo group that I talked to once only met in places over an hour away from me (and it's not as if I live out in the country somewhere, as I live in the inner D.C. suburbs) and B) free-mo requires DCC and I can't afford that as my hobby budget is largely nonexistent at the moment. Modules also require a fair bit of free wall space to store so don't resolve that issue, require expensive transport (again, not very affordable), and can't be used as easily at home.

Writing all this, I can't help but wonder as to why I am still in the hobby and looking for a way to build a layout. On the whole, I think this has a lot to do with a recent post on Stephen Gardiner's Musings on My Model Railroading Addiction blog. From what he writes on his blog, it sounds like he has much less space to work with than I do, and his recent post about how he is building a layout in what space he has was quite inspirational. It got me back to thinking about how I could build a layout in my space, rather than thinking about what I might to instead of model railroading.

I'm still no closer to coming up with any ideas as to either what to model or how to build a layout of it. I have a few ideas floating around, such as parts of CP Rails Toronto terminals, or I don't know what else. I think that I want to model something on CP Rail, but honestly I really am nowhere near identifying a concrete area to model. Nonetheless, it's good to be thinking about layout design and such after a while, and perhaps I'll find some sort of inspiration soon.

As a technical note, I am hereby abolishing Wordless Wednesday posts. I haven't succeeded in posting any recently, and given that it has failed in the purpose of making me post more more often, its time to retire that sort of post as a failed experiment.