I've been interested in model trains since I was a boy in the 1970s in Chicago. I owned a pre-fabricated layout in the early 1980s. I moved to the Twin Cities in 1994. When my son was 3, he and a couple of friends helped build a small layout with a mountain, but it didn't have good trackwork, and we abandoned it. Now I'm working on a Timesaver layout in HO with my older daughter, who is now 11.