On Saturday I hosted an open house layout tour for New Jersey Division of the NMRA. As Jimmy and myself were vacuuming and cleaning the tracks of our layout, I realized that the last time it had run was two years previous at another open house - January of 2017. The layout ran fine, abet without looking much different than the last time some of the people visited. I’d been down in the basement about a half dozen or so times over that same time span, but just to build a plastic non-railroad model kit or two or three. Of course I have stayed current as an arm chair modeler via the Facebook Steel Mill Modeler’s group of all the happenings in that world. It’s been nice to see so much good modeling.
What’s been going on? Well the short answer is life. My business grew quite a bit, peaking in terms of number of employees and number of jobs we were doing at once, around this time last year. Since then I have downsized, not for lack of work, but rather for my own sanity. I’m running with a much smaller team. During this “downsizing” I upsized my shop facility and invested in more equipment. We moved across a parking lot, into an old factory building that originally made aluminum TV dinner trays and pie plates. Our square footage tripled. Not wanting to make some of the mistakes I’d made in several previous shops, I was careful with the layout to allow for maximum efficiency. Moving our office, materials, and equipment took about two weeks via a forklift, however, setting up the shop, installing the electric, air, dust collection,....etc. and all the benches, shelving etc. has taken from August and continues, although the to-do list left is down to a page or two, and things are mostly fully functional. Just when I should have had more time on my hands, hundred, but more likely thousands of hours were spent just setting things up, primarily nights and weekends. The good news is that I’m recently feeling I have more spare time, or at least can take time away for myself without feeling guilty.
My personal life has been equally hectic. In the past year, both my children bought their own houses and moved out of mine. My daughter got married almost a year ago, but as you can imagine, wedding planing, parties and showers, etc, took up most of last fall. Wedding went off without a hitch, despite a late January date. My daughter wanted snow for it, but we got balmy 60 degree sunny weather. My daughter, who is one of those people that asks, where we are going for dinner while eating breakfast, promptly got pregnant, and as of this past October 30th, I have a Grandson. I’m sure the little guy is going to be into trains....
Even before we’d become empty nesters, I’d been talking to my wife about possibly moving to a bigger basement, with a house on it, or alternatively, an apartment in the city of Philadelphia. This put work on the layout on hold. Also, even if we stayed put, I’d considered ripping everything out and starting over with a better planned layout. In the end we are staying put. I think I was duped by my wife with the offer of a second train room (after I relocate the laundry room that takes up part of it, and renovate about 60 percent of the rest of the house). This new train room will feature an O-Scale 2 Rail (ie not Lionel) Penn Central switching layout, set in the early 70s in the swamps of New Jersey’s Chemical Coast. More on O-Scale later. Besides staying put in our house of 27 years, we bought land on the side of a mountain in Jim Thorpe, PA for a family vacation house. The construction of this, which Jimmy and myself will be doing the bulk of. Jim Thorpe is a beautiful little town in the Lehigh River Gorge. It was originally named Mauch Chunk, before the town purchased the body of the famous athlete Jim Thorpe and changed the name of the town, and was one of the commercial centers of the American industrial revolution. Anthracite coal mined in the mountains to the west of the city was moved through Mauch Chunk to market, using canal and railroad technology developed to do so. The Central Railroad of New Jersey and the Lehigh Valley Railroad ran through town on alternative sides of the river, and the Lehigh Valley had a large coal marshaling yard in town at one point. The railroads through town are still use for freight and a fairly busy, year round tourist railroad. The town is an outdoor sports Mecca of sorts today, with whitewater rafting on the river, bike trails on abandoned rail beds, hiking on mountain trials, and nearby ski areas. The tourist railroad has a dedicated gondola for transporting bicycles north twenty miles, where the riders disembark and ride down the side of the gorge back into town. The CNJ pulled out of Pennsylvania in I think the 70s and the LV altered their main line to use the parallel CNJ where more efficient. Fortunately for hikers and bicyclists, the abandoned main sections could only be placed close to the river due to the steep sides of the gorge, making for some nice scenery. We are hoping to start building in the spring or summer.
Looking over my layout Saturday I started making a list of projects. Besides the obvious, “when are you going to finish some structures”. I need to take some time to properly wire the layout, and make some track improvements in a few locations for smoother switching. Hopefully there will be some blog posts in the near future on this. Also, I’ll be including my O-Scale adventures. Stay tuned. Jim
