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Saturday, January 12, 2013

Novice Blog for a Novice Layout

After spending over a month working on my first real N Scale railroad layout, I decided to start a blog about the adventure. Why not?  I hope it will serve to capture lessons learned, since this is the "learning layout" and I'm sure there's others out there who may benefit from this journey.

Why "YORKTOWN M & S"?  Well, we needed a name for our railroad - or at least felt like we needed one!  We were married on the USS Yorktown and that name has historic significance in our area of Colonial Williamsburg.  M & S - Mike & Sheila.  After all, even though this is mostly my hobby/project, Sheila still enjoys the process and is a definite design contributor!

So there we were, hanging out with our friends Dan & Terry when Dan & I were kicking around ideas for some sort of "hobby".  Dan & I work at the same place and both needed some sort of stress diversion.  Dan mentioned model railroading and I said that I had some N Scale train stuff in storage.  I always liked N Scale since it allowed for a lot more layout in less space than HO Scale.  I went home and pulled out two banker boxes pretty full of N Scale stuff.  As I emptied the boxes, I realized I have about 40 pieces of rolling stock, 9 locos, a bunch of track, 24 motorized turnouts, two power pack/throttles and several other miscellaneous things.  Off we go!!!!

As an architect, I can frequently suffer from paralysis from analysis.  I waded through multiple layout books I had and downloaded XTrackCAD for some track designing.  Armed with plenty of ideas, room for a 4' x 8' layout and CAD software - I headed off into layout design!

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