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I hear you Tatans. I'm just getting back into the hobby (well, I'm hoping to soon, anyway) after about a 15 year abscence (since I was a kid). As a kid, I'd look at layouts in MR and count the turnouts - I'd count 50 turnouts on a moderate sized layout and know that was 50x10=$500 in turnouts, half of which had $12 Tortoise switch machines, etc. Now the costs are higher of course, and as an adult, the costs surprise me even more. As a kid, I always figured, "ahhh, when I grow up, this stuff will not seem expensive..." In these times where you have to cut your arm off to own a home here in California, the idea of spending loads of cash on a hobby seems insane. I'm determined to approach the hobby from a low-cost point of view. I plan on handlaying all of my track (read: cheap turnouts). There is no way I'll be paying big bucks for scenery materials - that stuff gets tossed whenever redo a section of the layout. I'll be figuring out how to make cheap scenery, etc. I'll also be sticking with a very small layout. I just picked up Iain Rice's book on small layouts - he's got some great ideas. I'll be focusing my efforts on more time consuming projects, where the cost is my time (which like most, I don't have much of either of course), but I'd rather have a small detailed unique layout that takes me years to build than a huge layout covered with off-the-shelf trees that cost like $5 each! That is insane!!!!! I'm going old-school! Do-it-myself is my motto.
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