I'm 54 years old and have wanted to put together a model railroad since I can remember. I served in the military many years and with the constant moving, was never able to do so. Now I've settled down in rural South Carolina. We just got custody of my 14 year old step-grandson. He's got special needs, and his mom passed away 3 years ago. I've never been real comfortable with children, but I needed to find something constructive we could do together, and my dream of a model railroad came up. So we are going to do this over time and within budget. I finally am at a place in life where I don't have a whole bunch of space constraints or financial constraints.
I had always planned on my dream layout being N-scale because of the fact you can fit so much more into the available space. And for me, realistic operation has always been my greatest interest.
Now my grandson is not interest in operation. He just wants to run trains. And I took him to a train show, and he wants to build a layout that we can take to train shows. So that points to n-scale too.
I bought him a starter n-scale set, which he loves. I found a plan that I'm adapting as our portable layout that has 3 loops so he could have 3 trains running at once. What it lacks is lots of sidings and yards for operating like I want to do, but I think I can add a second yard module to it eventually.
My concerns at this point - my eyes and hands have changed over the years, and N-scale is a whole lot smaller than it used to be. I'm now leaning back towards HO, but that take away a lot of portability. But we could do it in HO. Or we could do it in N and do a separate non-portable layout in HO. Space is not an issue.
I'm sort of rambling here, but I did want to introduce myself and Thomas, my grandson. And it helps me to put words down on paper or a computer screen to help collect my thoughts.