Hello from Utah!

[chadbag]

My name is Chad, I live in Utah with my family, near SLC, and I have been interested in, but never actually done anything, with model railroading since I was a kid (not including an old Lionel O or OO scale I inherited, which was all banged up, and I ended up selling for peanuts to finance a slot car set when I was around 11-12).  My brother had a cheap department store HO set (US trains) and I looked at the catalogs for that for years dreaming of making a big layout.  In High School we went on a short 4 week exchange to Germany and Göppingen, home of Märklin, and we had a factory tour and again it got the red blood flowing for model trains.  Alas, in HS, one does not usually have the funds for this sort of thing.  Later I lived in Germany and visited the hobby shops a lot looking at Arnold N-Scale, and collecting the catalogs.  But I did not have the funds or the place to set up.  I was particularly intrigued by the digital sets from Arnold (using Märklin system) from the early 90s on.

 

In 2000 I got married to a girl from Japan who was in the US studying.  We started going every other year to visit her family and we would ride lots of trains, with the help of the JR Rail pass.  My son was born and he was really interested in trains.  He collected the Tomica PLA-RAIL trains and we would go on excursions just to ride a new model train.  I started looking at KATO and Tomix N-Scale trains at Yodobashi Umeda and other places but my son was not old enough to really appreciate that and we did not have a good place to set up anyway.  Now, I am in my early 50s and my son is about to turn 15.  We were just there in Japan and ended up buying a bunch of KATO and a single Tomix trains, track, some buildings, a bunch of DCC decoders, and we got it all home.  I've since ordered more stuff from Amazon.co.jp and bought some generic stuff (like a DC power pack from Ahearn for testing and break in and an NCE Power Cab starter set for DCC) and we are endeavoring to set up a 4' x 8' semi-permanent "fun" (not really prototypical) layout and when we move in a few years to a new house we are planing now, we will have a dedicated train room and start the real layout then.  For now, we'll work on the 4x8, re-arranging as we learn more or get tired, etc.  I am making it so I can keep it up against the ceiling except when we want to use it as we don't have a lot of space in our basement.

 

Some day I'd like to get some European trains, as for a long part of my life, trains meant an Ausflug in Germany (I lived there, on the economy, for a total of about 4 years over 2 time spans, and travelled a LOT on DB trains), but for now we are dedicated to Japanese trains.

 

[miyakoji]

Hi Chad, welcome to the forum!

[cteno4]

Welcome chad! Glad your route in life brought you back to the model trains. Riding trains in japan and having kids will do it!

 

great idea to play now and find what you enjoy most before getting into full on layout mode! Unitrak is great for this and you can even do small scenery bits to try out scenery techniques and experiment and have fun stuff to poke around in the temporary setups! Also let’s you figure out things you have to have and things you don’t like!

 

start a thread on your temp stuff, always fun to watch folks hobby evolve! 

 

Neat idea to raise the layout up out of the way when space needed! Did you buy one of those garage ceiling storage system or righ your own up?

 

cheers,

 

jeff

[serotta1972]

Welcome chadbag! I too have a fascination for German and European trains but after getting into Japanese trains, they were expensive relative to Japanese trains.  And if I was going to spend that much for trains, I would rather get some HO Trains and I did and delved into Marklin Trains.  Nice to hear that the hobby is something that you are sharing with your son.

 

-Junior

[Kiha66]

Hello Chad, welcome to the forum!

[Sascha]

Welcome Chad!!!

[chadbag]

Thank you!  I feel welcome.

 

I will start a topic in the appropriate place once the "temporary" layout gets physically started.  Right now we are do kitchen table trains to get stuff figured out, programmed, etc.  Thanks again.

[cteno4]

Isn’t that what the kitchen table is for?!

 

jeff

[IST]

15 hours ago, cteno4 said:

Isn’t that what the kitchen table is for?!

I would say any table instead of kitchen table.