Do You Ever Finish Making Your Railway?

[dtb]

I want to finish my layout but still have loads to do, it's slow progress with me as both my hobbies are season dependent. Having an attic layout I do very little during the colder months and the warmer clime clashes with my motor sport. Watching 10 different series take some time to watch. I also still work full time.

I get little satisfaction from ballasting but do enjoy kit building, tinkering with stuff and soldering so the layout year on year mostly looks the same.
I buy older Tri-ang and Dublo loco's in the winter to tinker with and I still need to clear the garage for the Dublo 3 Rail layout.

Each year I promise to have a big push but it rarely happens.

[RAF96]

I am a 90% man. I start enthusiastically and get the main bulk of the work done but never finish the last 10%. I have several decades of things to finish off.

[teedoubleudee]

I am a 90% man. I start enthusiastically and get the main bulk of the work done but never finish the last 10%. I have several decades of things to finish off.

A man after my own heart LOL

[Walkingthedog]

I guess it depends what you mean by finished. You can always add another couple of people or seats or cable drums etc.

[Hound Dog]

How do you know it is not finished ?……. Run a train over a part of the layout not used for a while, aka usually the most inaccessible part of the layout, often in a tunnel…… and wait for the train to derail with regular occurrence.

Cue for new engineering works to begin…… or at least that is what resulted from my mid-week running session, when I sent a train down the hidden incline to the lower level storage yard

[loftman82]

I consider I finished my OO layout. There was nothing more I could do and I had sort of lost interest, so that was why I got rid of it.

That post has probably hit the nail on the head..........................

i could not expand my layout anymore, i most certainly could not start again, because physically i couldn`t , cost wise aswell and i really didn`t have the heart to pull up what i had created.

i did get bored at one stage then i remember waht some told me once when i was doing any DIY project if its getting to hard or things are not going right "stop and walk away " give it a few hours or days then return and i just altered little areas of the layout

But another aspect of this model railway hobby .......... i look on my loft as a sort of info centre or museum call it whatever so its not just the railway its the whole room for me

so when i can and with a bit of help i am going to re jig my notice board area (somehow) see photos

[Jsa274]

My layout has been under construction for years. Regrettably something else demands my time (such as car maintenance) or I lose interest in it for months at a time then have a sudden burst of enthusiasm to progress the build. Over the last few weeks I’ve made significant progress to the point that it’s structurally and electrically finished.

Whether I can keep the impetus to slog through the ballasting and some scenery is a different story though, but knowing it can be played with when the scenery is only part-completed should stop the malaise creeping back in.

Once the layout is finished, I hope to get some good use out of it before the itch to change something about it appears.. I am rueing the decision not to include a loco head shunt on my layout so I could move a freight loco between the TMD and the goods sidings without disturbing a train operating on the adjacent mainline. The layout design went through many serious iterations before I settled on ‘version 23’!