Introduction

Hello and welcome to my Model Railroader blog. This is intended to be a log of activities regarding the creation of my two model railroads. In part I'm doing this to create a journal that I can look back on later. And in part this blog is meant to help motivate me to do a little bit every day on the model railroads. I tend to stick to a daily building regime for months at a time but, once I skip a day or two, I can go months without making any progress.

The title "Average Model Railroader" is in deference to the National Model Railroad Association's (NMRA) Master Model Railroader (MMR). An MMR is difficult to obtain -- there have been less than 500 in the 25 or so years the program has been in existence, which is a tiny percentage of the 19,000 NMRA members and the 100s of thousands of model railroaders world wide. No, I'm not doing great stuff, yet. But am trying to build the skills needed to do great modeling. In the process I involve our 4 kids (ages 8-15) as much as possible.

There are 4 layouts (or potential layouts) in and around our house at different stages of construction:

1. The most active layout resides in the loft above our garage. I will describe this in detail in my next post. It's a double-deck N scale layout occupying roughly 500 square feet of floor space (counting aisles). At 1:160 scale N is a little more than half the size of the most common scale, HO (1:87), and about 2/7th the size of the O-scale (1:48) Lionel trains of yore.
2. My other active layout is the opposite of the N scale layout in most respects. It’s outdoor and in F scale (1:20.3, which is a little larger than the more widely known 1:22.5 “G” scale). Living in Colorado, this layout is in hibernation during the winter. In a few months I’ll write a post describing this layout, but for now I’ll just note that it is intended to be a prototype (i.e. based on a real railroad) model of the Denver & Rio Grande circa 1884-5 between Salida and Leadville, Colorado.
3. Nearly 20 years ago, while living in Europe, I built a 1x3 meter Märklin HO scale layout that survived a move to U.S., but not a subsequent move to Colorado. I still have the equipment, and have some vague plans to revive some of it for a winter layout "someday".
4. My son has acquired a good amount of HO equipment over the years, and I’d like to get a basic layout running for him. Just kicking around some ideas now, but hope to return to this later this year.

My next post will provide an overview of the iNdoor layout.