Hobby Trains
Hobby trains 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 guess my mother later regretted it, as she spent quite a hundred dollars on my hobby. It was no wonder that when I was about 10, she told me I’d have to earn my own money by helping her more around the house. By the time I was 16, I started to get small student jobs in order to be able to increase my collection.
When I was a pre-teen, I preferred HO scale hobby trains because they looked bigger and colorful. I would buy pre-made or pre-assembled tracks, because I didn’t want to bother much with the setting. I just wanted to see my train run.
However, once it was up and running, I would place objects 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.
When I had to earn 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 trains to run over 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 pay more attention to the layout. Tracks started to have more curves and small building and cars started replacing action figures as the surroundings of my hobby trains.
By the time I finished college and moved out, I had changed my hobby trains preference 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 trains themselves. And since my apartment 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 finish. Part of the reason is that the work involved in creating the scenario was a bit too overwhelming and resulted in weekends where I would do nothing. In the end, I decided to reduce the track length and discard some ideas that were just out of my skills, like a tunnel, and build something simpler but more realistic. The result was a small, very, very simple city where my trains took people to the 7 or 8 buildings that existed in it.
With time, I became better at it. I have much more experience with the work involved, although I still tend to go a bit over what my time and my money allows me. The only problem is that I don’t have much space, so when I finish a layout and have a few runs with my hobby trains, it doesn’t take me long to want to take it out and create a new or different one.
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