Saturday, November 14, 2009

Welcome to my model railroading chronicle!

After a 10 year absence from the hobby I'm returning to the hobby I just can't seem to get away from.  Model Railroading has always been a love of mine, starting with the first layout I got for Christmas in 1970 when I was 6 years old growing up as an Army brat in Germany.  It was a Fleischmann HO set mounted to a 4x6 board.  I still have the rolling stock from that set to this day.  Like any kid, a lot of different things got my interest, however I always seem to gravitate back to the trains.

Going to college marked my first hiatus from the hobby, but it was a short one.  After getting married and going to grad school I started back into model railroading again.  I dabbled in German N scale for a few years, building a few hollow core door layouts that never went very far. I then started getting into southeastern US HO trains, and with the purchase of our first house I built a 22'x16' L shaped HO layout.  It was my first serious layout, and had all the typical first layout mistakes, but I was learning.  I even joined a local club, Smokey City Rails, which had a modular HO layout.  I made a lot of great friends thru the club, however I was never really satisfied with HO.  It took up too much space to do anything that looked realistic without having a warehouse to build a layout.   It was the late 1990's, and N scale started catching my eye again...

I started noticing that the quality and realism of N scale, and in particular US prototype models, was really improving.  Atlas, Kato, and MicroTrain rolling stock was starting to rival the quality of German prototype N scale maker Fleischmann, and with one big difference:  it was less than one third of the cost!  The HO layout was torn down, I sold off all my HO equipment to fund my switch to N scale, this time in US prototype, in particular southeastern railroading around Birmingham, Alabama.  Thus in early 1998 the 1st Cahaba Southern was born...