Hobby railroads have been my hobby all my life. Ever since I received my first one when I was 6, I have collected and treasured them.

I presume my mother later regretted it, as she spent quite a hundred dollars on my pastime. It was no surprise that as I was about 10, she told me I’d have to earn my own money by helping her more around the home. By the time I was 16, I started to get small student jobs in order to be able to increase my collection.

While I was a pre-teen, I favored HO scale hobby trains since they looked larger and colorful. I would buy pre-made or pre-assembled tracks, as I didn’t like to worry much with the setting. I just wanted to see my train run.

However, once it was up and running, I would place stuff around my hobby train and invent adventures in my mind. I must admit that at first, I used actions figures that had nothing to do with hobby trains, like my Ghostbusters and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles action figures.

As soon as I had to make my own money to pay for my hobby trains, I started to take care of them much better. No longer I put obstacles or hostages on the rails for the railroads to run above or set up train wreckages. With time, I even started buying cleaning materials in order to keep my hobby trains neat.

I also began to give more attention to the outline. Tracks started to have additional curves and tiny construction and cars started replacing action figures as the surrounds of my hobby trains.

By the time I completed university and moved out, I had changed my hobby trains liking from HO scale to N scale. This is because I became as interested in the settings that my hobby trains would run through as in the railroads themselves. And as my residence was small, N scale would let my trains have longer runs and more complex layouts.

My first layout was too ambitions, and it took me months to come to an end. Part of the reason is that the work implicated in creating the scenario was a bit too overwhelming and resulted in weekends where I would do nothing. In the end, I determined to decrease the track length and abandon some ideas that were just out of my skills, like a tunnel, and build something simpler but more realistic. The result was a little, very, very straightforward city where my trains took citizens to the 7 or 8 buildings that existed in it.

With time, I became better at it. I have much more experience with the effort involved, even though I still tend to go a bit over what my time and my funds allows me. The only trouble is that I don’t have much room, so when I terminate a layout and have a few runs with my hobby trains, it doesn’t take me long to would like to take it out and create a new or different one.