Some History

Let's jump back on the HO railroad a bit because I thought I would share a little on how this project came to be.

In the past I would typically see my son and daughter a couple of times a week and every other weekend and some holidays. Everything seemed to be going great with them. That was up until three years ago when over the Christmas break my daughter would no longer stay the night. My son shortly followed suit. Over the years that followed I would only see them a few hours during the week to go out to for dinner and then on the occasional weekend afternoon. As that time pasted though my son began to show an increasing desire to spend more time with me and began to come without his sister.

And now my son has been doing a great job in his efforts to spend more time with me. It has taken some time to get back to a more consistent routine but he really wants to spend this time together which is nice.

So, that brings me to were we are now. We wanted to come up with some ongoing project that we could do on those weekends together. After discussing a couple of ideas we settled on the HO layout. I had a lot of the trains, tracks and building left over from previous layouts from my youth, so all we needed to get started was a track plan and some lumber to build the bench work.

After looking over various small track plans from old issues of Model Railroad Magazine and the internet we decided on a more challenging horse shoe style plan over the more traditional 4'x 8' plan. What we settled on as our inspiration was a 10'x 10' plan we found at Costume Model Railroads on the internet. We then pick a time period, theme, and location to model. For that we decided to model the north east United States in a sort of an alternate reality that had a predominately 50's era look but we wanted to let ourselves be free to include road names, rolling stock, vehicles and historic scenarios from any time period.

We then began the building of the bench work. Pictured here is our bench work efforts
we will next work on the track work.