Starting the Railroad

Here's how the Silver Mountain Railroad got started. I'm completely new to model railroading. Well, that is not exactly true as I did have a cheap Lima branded HO trainset when I was a kid. I always wanted a Marklin set, but we could not afford it so it was never to be. I had a lot of fun as a kid putting together and operating my single diesel engine and three or so passenger cars in our basement. But then I acquired other interests and never thought about railroads again.

That is, of course, before I became a father and got two wonderful sons, one of which is the biggest train fanatic I have ever known. I have a 6-year old and 4-year old, and ever since he could talk, my younger one has loved trains. He has train t-shirts, train books, train posters, wooden toy trains, the works. After seeing the All About Trains DVD about three years ago, which includes a section where model railroad hobbyists put together a train layout,  he has insisted that we should get a real train table, with scenery and real electric trains whizzing about. So it became destiny, and this Christmas I and my wife decided that he was old enough to graduate to "real" miniature trains.

I did what most fathers of little train fans do, and got an HO scale Bachmann train set from Amazon. I thought I would get some EZ track that Max could lay on the floor on his own and keep him busy while I worked on a more permanent train layout, also in HO scale, that he could then run his trains on. I studied trains online and from some books, and decided to get a DCC equipped set from the beginning so we could run multiple trains on the layout at the same time.

A moment of reckoning came when I was at Home Depot, with a 4x8 sheet of plywood in my cart. I realized there was no way I could find a place in our house to build and play with something that big. And 4x8, I had learned, was just about as small as HO layouts get, with 18" curves and perhaps a bit of a yard and some grades. So I put the plywood back on the rack, went to the door section and got a 36" wide HCD door for an N-scale layout instead. That was one of those moments when you know what you gotta do. I knew I had to invest in two sets of trains and rolling stock, but also knew that I had made a decision that allowed us to get a whole lot more enjoyment out of railroading by having a more compact, move-proof, and more varied train layout.

Christmas came and Santa brought Max a really nice HO set, with three engines (I had to get an extra steam engine since those are his favorites) and eight or so freight cars. In parallel, I had ordered some N-scale tracks, roadbed, and landscaping supplies for the real layout. But more on that in the next post.