cheaper than a shoe string budget

[Anonymous]

OTN: where in the "sooner state" are you located? Give me a call at <[e-mail]>. Maybe you are close enough I can help you.

[Anonymous]

The thing you've got going for you at your age is plenty of time. Once you get older, other interests take up most of your time, so it's hard to find time for model railroad construction even though you have more money to spend. So take your time and use the building of your railroad as a great learning experience.

The next advice I have is to start small. Don't try to build a 20' x 12' layout on your first try. 4' x 8' or even smaller is fine for a first layout. Nobody's layout is ever "finished" anyway, so there's no reason to hurry. Just enjoy the journey and the fun of trying out different ideas. That way, you can learn whether you prefer a lot of trackwork and running trains, or maybe you'd prefer sparse tracks set in breathtaking scenery.

If you start with too big of a project, you'll soon get tired of building benchwork and laying track and doing wiring before you get to the fun stuff. So keep it small -- you might even try just building a 2' x 4' module that can later be incorporated into a larger layout. When you get to scenery, you might try one of the Woodland Scenics starter kits that allows you to build and scenic a small diorama, all the time learning the techniques and skills you'll need later on a more extensive project.

Finally, don't wait until you've finished the whole layout (if such a thing is possible) before you run some trains. Even if it's just a big loop with one or two sidings and a couple of temporary wires to the power pack, have some fun running your trains and imagining how much more realistic they'll look when you have scenery and buildings and people and such. Your imagination is your greatest asset! Enjoy!

Bill
Prescott, AZ

[Anonymous]

I would say buy a circle of track put in about two siding. Put in a road a little creek and a bridge. Now to finish it buy a $5.00 controllerfrom a train show but buy the train from a hobby shop with your left over money and maybe a little caboose if your have which have but if you don't well save your money.

[Anonymous]

Woodland Scenics has the best stuff out there for landscaping your layout, but I found a cheaper way to ballast your track. Go to Lowes and buy a bag of Garden Plus patio / paver base. If you use a sifter and a funnel, you can get your rocks and ballast from the same bag and believe me, you'll have more than enough for a moderate sized layout. Total cost : less than $5.00.

[Don Gibson]

NICE thing about the MRR hobby:

You can BUY it
or BUILD it.

[Anonymous]

You want cheap materials and are willing to substitute labor for cash outflow, go find a subdivision of houses under construction. Every single house will have a pile of cut ends, materials no longer of interest to the contractor. You approach the contractor, tell him what you want, he will let you pick the pile all day. You are saving him the cost of paying someone to take the pile to the landfill. You wiill be able to pick what you might use, you do not need to haul the entire pile. If you find something smaller, like dimensioned lumber, that you want, take it home and laminate pieces together until you have the size you want. For a flat top table using cookie cutter construction to get elevation change on your layout, the larger pieces of OBS (wafer board) or plywood can be pieced together to cover as large a table as you will ever build. If you are willing to hustle, and have a friend that will haul your treasure, you can build the underpinnings for you layout for the cost of a little carpenters glue and a few screws. The track, locomotives and rolling stock can be added as slowly as you need to stay within your budget. You are not going to build anything worthwhile over a single weekend, or in a single month. If you do not hurry and do your very best, your budget just might match your more comfortable pace. I've been modelling this way for over 40 years now, and I have accumulated what might be considered an empire of stuff.

Tom

[Anonymous]

I have found ebay to be rather useful when looking for less expensive cars, building etc.
There are always good deal on there to start. for benchwork you can always visit a factory or something like that and take home a couple of skids, I then went to the lumber store and bought some 2x4 and made that nailed to the skid my benchwork,
I actually came across a ping pong table in the newspaper, bought it, took the frame and legs off it and used that for my top.. That was only 25.00 !!
it will take time but i am sure you will have all winter to work on it. good luck

[Anonymous]

You have been given some great advice and I know what not to do !! I have been buying a lot ( a whole lot ) of rolling stock , way to many buildings, kits I will never find the time to put together and now i have nothing up and running and as a matter of fact NOTHING BUILT. Your budget may be a blessing. I have so muck " stuff " I do not know where to start. Truley ; I sometimes walk around in circles trying to organize all my stuff so I can get going.. GOOD LUCK And rember KIS. ( keep it simple )

[railfanespee4449]

2 words- TRAIN SHOWS! Cheap engines, but before you buy anything, find a display layout and test it (I paid $20.00 for a Tyco U-boat & caboose. It actually had a burned-out motor!)

[Anonymous]

Look for local builders... carpenters and General contractors (maybe roofers, too) as they can be sources of large sheets of plywood- although not full-size. volunteer to remove any over 3 square feet... there may be plenty, especially in new home construction.

Cabinetry and kitchen remodellers may offer scrap millwork... 1x2, 1x3, 1x4 sizes.

be sure to cull out the knots and rough surface plywood... not worth the work to clean up or re-surface.

(I got a similar source for about half the lumber on my 5x15 foot layout - and about 1/3 was rejected - but still had plenty to keep busy until the budget improved.)

[cwclark]

I have found stuff in thrift shops and garage sales...in fact i went to one garage sale and the guy had over 50 old HO cars and a few engines and buildings...I got most of the stuff that i wanted from his "train pile" in the front yard for under $10 dollars!...it's kind'a hard to find train stuff at a garage sale but when you do, it can be a mother load....Chuck[:D]

[Anonymous]

Im in 8th grade so i have the same budget problems as you. ive been doing this for about 4 years now though. I like to go to train shows and look for stuff thats pretty beat up. Consequently its cheap[:D]. Not only does this save me some money, I have fun fixing up old broken down pieces of junk and making them look and run great. Its cheaper to go to your LHS and buy a few superdetail parts then it is to buy an expensive engine. But if your new to the hobby you should get to know what your doing first. Talk to some local modelers and get some experience. Then you can start building grade A models from piles of junk.[:D]

[Jetrock]

QUOTE: Originally posted by cwclark

I have found stuff in thrift shops and garage sales...in fact i went to one garage sale and the guy had over 50 old HO cars and a few engines and buildings...I got most of the stuff that i wanted from his "train pile" in the front yard for under $10 dollars!...it's kind'a hard to find train stuff at a garage sale but when you do, it can be a mother load....Chuck[:D]

Amen to that!! One pointer for garage sales is that if you see ANYTHING train-related, ask if they have more. I was at a garage sale this spring and found a 1950's Marklin catalog and just happened to ask if he had more railroad stuff--I ended up taking home four big boxes of American and European HO stuff for $50, including a couple of dozen HO scale cars, a new-in-the-box Roundhouse SP 2-8-0, several built and un-built Faller and Kibri structure kits, and an Eheim trolley-bus kit.

Ask. You never know what you'll find...and a "plus" of being young is that many of us older model railroaders are so eager to encourage new blood in the hobby, and don't mind passing along "extra" equipment to young folks...so if any of your parents' friends are model railroaders, make sure you comment on how great their layout is and how you wish you had the equipment to build something like it! (Just ask my nephew...he's going to get a lot of the rolling stock I mentioned in the above paragraph!)

[krump]

Jetrock - Happy Forum Anniversay buddy. Thanks for your shoestring thoughts, very helpful[^]
cheers
Krump

[Anonymous]

My recommendation would be to NOT buy any track or trains yet. You need to purchase things like layout books, articles on the time period you want to model, benchwork, wiring, whether you want DC or DCC. I recommend DCC. To me, it's just ludicrous to go DC today. No offence to you DC guys, I know there are a lot of you out there. DCC is the wave of the future. There's just tons more important stuff to spend money on right now, than trains. Think about this: What if you buy all that stuff and then decide model railroading isn't for you? At least if you buy books and literature first, you'll learn a lot, and probably decide for sure if it's what you want to do.

[Anonymous]

For structures, try card modeling. All you need is a printer , some card stock, sissors and glue. Do some searching on the internet for card models. Alot of sites have free downloads. Download them, print them, cut them out and glue together. Use alittle strip wood for bracing and you have the cheapest structures possible, and they don't look bad, either. Office Depot and stores like that have card stock by the ream at usually less than $10.00.
When I started out, that's what I used to fill up the layout, and then slowly replaced most of them as I built or bought other structures.
Scenery? I used sticks and twigs found in the yard with painted pillow foam, cotton, and balls of hair from the hair brush. Mine didn't look quite as good as some of the commercial stuff, but they looked one heck of a lot better than a bare layout.
Look around the house and in the trash. There are all sorts of things you can use to make things. Scratch build all you can. Your first attempts will probably not turn out too well. You'll get better with each thing you build. Just don't get discouraged. It doesn't have to look like what the pro's do. They've been practicing for years. Keep trying, and yours will end up looking as good as theirs. You will be alot prouder of something you built yourself , than with something you bought.

[ARTHILL]

Join a club. Most of us would love to give a kid a start. I started at 7th grade, a paper route and Christmas kept me going. I didn't rival John Allen, but then in my retirement I don't either. Have fun on the cheap. Too much money and too little health will come all too soon.

[Anonymous]

Well $50.00 a month is a good range for you to get started on small projects that over time come together as one large one. I have found that friends and reletives (spelling) can be a great scource of material all my 2x4's are given to me free I get them in 10 to 12 foot lengths from my uncle he works in a shop that makes Catepiller fenders and fuel tanks and sometimes the door frames for Amtrak cars, THe wood seperates the steel sheets there just thrown away after there doen so there new and they come wrapped in plastic so there nice and clean.

Keep plugging away a little here and a little there and before long you will have alot completed.

[robengland]

Good, fast and cheap: you can have any TWO.

We know it has got to be cheap, so that leaves "good" and "fast". Well, you've had lots of advice to take your time but at your age that isn't going to wash, so drop "good":

Scrounge everything you can, lots of good advice above.
Buy everything else second hand if you can
Buy the cheapest of everything you have to buy new.

Try to focus on scrounging or buying only what you need right now for the current project.

Build a fast cheap crappy layout and have a ball doing it. Learn all you can. Then girls and cars will put the railroad into suspension for 5-10 years. When you come back to your senses you'll have an income and THEN you can take your time and build a good one.

And join a club because even the advice I've given isn't going to give you a layout as fast as you'll want one.

[miniwyo]

I too am also on a shoestring budget, not only on my 4'x4' module at the local club in HO scale, but I would also like to build a 4'x6' N scale layout. For my N scale layout i have an $80 startup budget with a subsequent $35 per month for the n scale plus another $25 per month HO scale budget.
Gonna start the N scale layout off by building the benchwork out of scrounged 1x4 pine and 1" blue foam and buy a failry nice set.
My module at the club has ready made benchwork, and 1 1/2'' bluefoam on it, and I also had an old building donated to me to use.

[bbrant]

I'm working on a shoestring budget myself so I'll gladly share some tips I've encountered.

Right now I'm working on the scenery portion of my layout. I want my layout to look as realistic as possible so what's more natural than real dirt. As I was removing some rocks from a dirt pile in my yard, I kept some of the fine dirt. to use on my layout. Makes a fine base coat and requires less ground foam. Larger "clumps" I've found work great for creek beds, especially if they have some larger (well, large for HO scale) rocks. You may need/want to sift the dirt to remove bigger clumps that wouldn't look prototypical.

My artistic talents are, well, non-existant. For rock cuts I used actual rocks. I have them arranged in a convincing/realistic manner and plan to fill in the gaps between them with ground foam. One of the members from our local club used tree bark glued together to make rock cuts. He did a small amount of painting to improve the look but the end result was very pleasing.

For trees, guys from our club have used different types of vegitation they were able to collect from their flower gardens in the fall or from a stroll through the woods. Goldenrod I believe is something they used for trees. Don't hold me to that because my knowlege of plants is about as good as my artstic skills!! lol

All the items mentioned above cost only time and effort - no impact on the wallet. For the non-freebies here's a few other options.

For paint, go to the "oops" section of your local home improvement store. I got two gallons of paint - one green and one a browni***an - to paint the benchwork prior to applying scenery materials. Total cost of the paint was $10 and I have plenty left over. The painting also helps to cut down on the amount of scenery materials that needs to be purchased, such as ground foam.

Another fellow from our club purchased a small bag of planting soil that he uses for dirt. I believe the cost was under $5 and he was able to achieve good results with it.

Those are some of the cost saving measures I've used for scenery. If I can think of anything else, I'll be sure to post.

Brian