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Unfortunately, I was the youngest in my family, so I wasn’t allowed to play with them very much at the same time that everyone else in the family was interested. Eventually, after my older brother and sisters were kind of beyond toy trains, I would get to get out all the stuff from time to time and play with it by myself. Sometimes I’d bring friends over and we’d build huge layouts that went from room to room. We had about 4 engines too, so we could run multiple layouts and never crash into each other (unless we wanted to). The only problem with this setup was that it was temporary, and I’d have to break it all down and put it away every night. When I went to visit my Grandma, my friends up there (she lived in Michigan) would have setups in there basements that they would work on with their Dads. These were permanent setups, and had mountains and tunnels and lots of other things I couldn’t set up at home. I was really impressed by these setups, and always wanted to do one of my own, but time and space made that a dream. After a while, my interest in toy trains faded into models, airplanes and motorcycles, etc. I grew older and my brother started his own family, which included two boys of his own. Since Jeff and I had been the only ones ever really interested in the trains, my folks just considered the train stuff as ours together. So when Jeff told me he had taken the trains from my parents’ house, I just let him keep them thinking that his kids would enjoy them. As far as I know, those trains are still packed away in his attic. Both of his boys are grown up with kids of their own now, and neither remembers playing with the trains at all. Oh well, chalk that one up to experience I guess. My brother has a little problem with sharing, and I’d rather have to buy a full-sized, REAL train than try to get him to be less stingy, so when I decided to get back into trains again I never mentioned it to my family at all. Anyway, since size and space were always issues before, I wanted to use a smaller scale for this project, so I went with z gauge. Z scale trains had just started to take off when I got out of trains before. They are 1:220 scale, so a human being is slightly smaller than a dry grain of rice. 6mm = about 10’. Working in a scale this tiny would only require a base of about 2’ by 4’ to create a very realistic railroad setup. There are actually manufacturers out there who build this gauge into brief cases for portable train sets! Best of all, there is some very active trading going on within the Ebay community, so parts and trains are easy to come by (but not cheap). My real excuse for building this railroad was because I wanted to create my own little town and scenery, and I needed movement within to add realism. As you can see from the pictures in this article, I’m really more about the buildings and scenery than the trains themselves. Here’s the logic I used while creating my little town, and the issues that have to be addressed if you want to build one too. |
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