| 1982-3 - Early Large Scale Trains Interest In the early 1980s, I saw LGB stuff at a local hobby shop and thought it was cute. However most of the American-prototype pieces seemed toylike, and the cost seemed astronomical. (I learned later that the hobby shop was charging above list price for many goods.) |  |
1984 - Our first Large Scale Foray - When our first daughter was about three, Bachmann came out with a battery-powered 4-6-0 set that resembled a US prototype. The Bachmann looked just as toylike as the LGB (maybe moreso), but it was $80, instead of several hundred. We soon had a brightly-colored train grinding around a loop of plastic track in the living room. I built some buildings and bought some accessories and joined the Miami Valley Garden Railways Society. (At the time there were about ten members.) One young man in the club said we had no business having fun until we had argued about standards and petitioned the manufacturers.
An LGB fan named Decker said he'd rather just "drink beer and run trains." But the Race's yard and house were both too small for any kind of permanent railroad, and things stayed on hold until after we had moved, I had changed jobs, and we had had two more children. In the meantime, I subscribed to GR off and on, and made several purchases which found their way to the attic in the new house, except when they were gracing the floor around the Christmas tree.
1997 - Sorting Out the Facts - By the mid-1990s we owned a hodgepodge of trains, including Bachmann, Lionel, and LGB. Though most of our trains represented narrow gauge equipment, I still wanted to model a standard gauge railroad as Dad and I had in S and HO. By then there were no hobby shops in the area carrying Large Scale, so I bought several different brands of cars used over the Internet to see how they compared. One day, I spent a few hours with rulers and a test track, going over every aspect of the examples. |  |
| I learned that only one "standard gauge" line at that time (and for the next several years, by the way) had well-detailed, well-proportioned models that were in the same scale across most of the product line. I began trading offscale or narrow-gauge gear for standard-gauge stuff. |  |
After evaluating several brands of track the same way, I decided that Aristo track, with its screw-on rail joiners and wider radii would give me a more reliable rail system for less money than most other brands. I bought a couple loops' worth of Aristo 10' diameter track and several long straight pieces and turnouts.
Planning and Hoping - By late 1997 I was running out of room in the attic, and was storing stuff in the garage. So the trains were closer to the garden, at least. And I was really planning on doing something the following year, so much so that I picked up a pond liner at a fall closeout, though I had no clear idea where the pond or the railroad were going to go. (I didn't realize then, as I do now, that a dinky pond is only slightly less trouble to maintain than a large pond, and a lot less impressive.)
Best of luck,
Paul D. Race
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