About 4 decades ago I was visiting neighbor's garage sale, and there, under the table was a big box{actually boxES} of Lionel trains and track and transformers. I begged and pleaded with my father to buy it/them. He DID go look and decide NOT to "buy someone else's junk". BUT at Christmas {when I'd nearly totally forgotten about the trains altogether} THERE IT WAS!! Under the tree was an oval of Marx O27 steam train!!!
Later that grew into a 3 intertwined oval layout on an L shaped 2 4x8 sheets layout to play with during my pubescent and teen years, that I had to share with my brother. We could run three trains {one for me, one for my brother, and one for my father to run {which he rarely did}.
Then as a teen, I Had a GF whose parents were moving. Her Father was THROWING OUT Into a very large dumpster a bunch of N scale stuff!!! He dind't have a layout, but "collected" N scale stuff. I was digging the stuff out of the dumpster. He discovered this and said "don't you think you should compensate me for that stuff?" I said, very clearly, and not earning any brownie points with him, that "you have tossed this stuff into the trash, therefore it has NO VALUE to you and I can take it f I wish to rifle through the trash". So then I had a small N scale layout.
I always wanted HO tough.
Fast forward to 6 years ago. There, on the marque sign the nearby auction house uses, was a telling of a model train show/sale coming up so we {My Other Half - MOH} went as MOH was also fascinated with trains. We didn't see much that was in good shape as it had obviously been stored in a damp dirty basement {why do people do that?}. We declined to buy anything. SO I went digging for my N scale stuff and found it lacking for what I wanted now. MOH said to not throw it away, MOH would be glad to use it!! SO MOH is into N scale and I am into newly purchased HO.
I pushed an issue in the smallest of the bedrooms in our trailer home and built a small HO scale layout. We ran HO and N Scale under the tree at Christmas time.
I have recently torn my HO scale MINI layout down to tracks only as I was going to expand it some, but the room is packed with everything we have no basement or available storage for, so that idea got nixed.
We hope to someday get a house with a basement {dry, clean} to build a couple of layouts.. An HO for me and an N for MOH.
That's my/our story and I'm sticking to it!

-G .
Just my thoughts, ideas, opinions and experiences. Others may vary.
HO and N Scale.
After long and careful thought, they have convinced me. I have come to the conclusion that they are right. The aliens did it.