Hard, Harder, Hardest...

They say that the hardest part about any project is getting started, but we didn’t necessarily find that to be true. Don’t get me wrong, getting started was hard, it just wasn’t the hardest part of the project.

The first challenge we faced was trying to find a place to put the layout. We live in a 200-year-old house and, while we’ve got a fair amount of space, a lot of it is in the form of small or oddly shaped rooms.

The solution to our dilemma was my wife’s. As surprised as I was to hear myself say that we could build a train layout, I was doubly surprised to hear my wife say, “Why don’t you just put the trains in the living room?”

The starting point: Our formal living room before being converted into a train room.

To begin our project, we cleared all the furniture out of the living room and brought up boxes and boxes of trains from the basement. This happened shortly before Thanksgiving, 2003.

This is what the living room looked like with 90% of the boxes brought upstairs. A piece of a
control panel I had once built as a teenager is visible in the middle.

Because we live in an old house, we decided it wouldn’t be a good idea to construct a layout that blocked our access to the front door (shown in the pictures above). Eliminating one possible emergency exit just didn’t seem to be a good idea.

In order to keep the pathway clear, we decided to build our layout on two 4’ x 12’ tables positioned on either side of the door. The tables would be connected by two multi-track bridges.

With this first critical design decision under our belt, I made a trip to the local lumberyard.

Now that the lumber has been purchased, we’re ready to begin building the benchwork.
We decided that the table height would be flush with the window sills shown in
the upper left of the picture.

To be honest, the hardest part of the project was having to deal with the creeping realization that it would be months before we actually had a roomful of running trains....