Model Railway Forum

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.

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.

RAF96 wrote: ↑Sun Mar 06, 2022 9:21 am 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

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

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

Walkingthedog wrote: ↑Tue Mar 01, 2022 7:11 pm 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

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’!