Our Model Railroads Over The Years
The saga begins thirty years ago when we moved to Longwood from Palm Bay, Florida, after my "Christmas present" for 1994. I lost my job, but all was not lost. It didn't seem like it at the time, but it was a good thing. In fact, I found a much better paying job, and with MUCH better perks. Made a lot of money off those stock options... But that's not what we're here for.
Fast forward to my Christmas present from my wife, an Amtrak FP40 and a couple of gen 4 passenger cars. Time for me to get out what was left of my HO scale layout from my junior high days, at least what was left that my Dad was able to save of it. Sadly, most of the track was the old style brass track track. Worse yet, ALL my engines and rolling stock was of questionable quality, mostly Tyco with some Bachmann and LifeLike thrown in for good measure.
I also had a few of those three story apartment buildings, a station, and one of those old coal mines in the stash. The best thing about our 4 bedroom home is we only needed three actual bedrooms. That extra bedroom became my office, and very soon after receiving that present, the train room. I knew it had to be a "bookshelf" layout because there just wasn't room for a table style, 4x8 sheet of plywood.
Well, things kind of grew from there. Not only had I expanded into the closet with a huge duck under bridge in the office doorway, I soon expanded into the corner bedroom next to the office when our daughter moved out. There were two pass throughs withh openings in the drywall in both rooms. The corner room as we called it was double size of the office, and two decades is plenty of time to build an model railroad empire.
Our first garden railroad incarnation, where our family grew up In Wekiva Springs
Our next garden railroad incarnation, the first in Mount Dora.
Our latest garden railroad incarnation in Mount Dora.
Maybe my wife wanted to share the experience and enjoyment of running model trains by suggesting we build a garden scale layout, or maybe she had an ulterior motive, although I'm not sure what that would be. She found a used Bachmann Big Hauler for sale in the local trade rag for $50. It was a well used ten wheeler with tender and two passenger cars.
That "Royal Blue" set was the beginning of it all. We set up a simple oval of the cheap steel indoor track on the patio by the pool. It soon grew to engulf the patio and surround the pool with the addition of Aristocraft stainless steel track and wide radius switches. On one of our many jaunts to Mount Dora, we found three sets of ten wheelers and bought the lot. Our pike's rolling stock rapidly expanded in an afternoon.
For our 30th Anniversary trip we visited the Cass Scenic Railway deep in the mountains of West Virginia. It must have been an inspiration to Ann, because for Christmas I got a three truck shay like the ones we rode. I got her a Virginia & Truckee ten wheeler set with quite a few passenger cars. From there, the layout exploded into the side yard, complete with water feature. All that remained was plumbing in a pump.
Speaking of plumbing... If you guessed a burst pipe would chase us out of our home of twenty years to our new home in Mount Dora, you're correct! That meant slowly disassembling the first incarnation of our garden scale pike and storing it until we could start planning our new layout. There was a whole list to do first that we planned on taking our time to accomplish before we moved in. Fate had different plans for us.
In case you haven't noticed, we're talking about things progressing forward from the past to the present while presenting them from the present and going back in time. The presentations closer to the present have more detail and better captured the details using more modern technology. Much of the older details are either older digital photos of rather dubious quality, say 320 x 240.
Much of our early life in Florida is captured by actual photographs, then scanned using "high resolution" at the time, now depressingly low quality. Many of those old photographs have yet to be scanned to electronic format. Seems like every time I started a scanning project, the scanner would die on me halfway into the venture. Much of our life still sits in a foot locker waiting to be remembered and revisited, and in some cases, rescanned.