One of the joys I had in writing Vengeance was sneaking in my lifelong love of model railroading. I’ve mentioned in earlier posts about the wonderful memories I have of working in the basement beside my father, laying track and then watching the small trains work their way around the cozy little universe we’d created for them. While we never actually completed any of those layouts — my father seems to this day predisposed to endlessly tinker with his plans — just the very act of puttering around provided a quiet satisfaction that made the wider world just a little bit more bearable.
While writing has always offered me a bit of an escape from the pressures of my day job, I find it best to augment that effort with an endless supply of science-fiction based plastic model kits, a fleet of LEGOs and, for many years, my own small layout. We don’t have basements here in Arizona, so my options for creating a miniature empire are limited to the space I have available; since taking over the garage was out, my very amenable wife originally allowed me to set up shop in a corner of our master bedroom, and there I began to build a small n-scale layout from a kit I found at a local hobby store.
It progressed quite far — the photo above shows when I was working on the mountains, with the hint of the track I had laid through them. I managed to get the track completed, wired and functional, and had gotten to the stage of doing the scenery — and there I faltered. Part of it was my desire not to subject my wife to the extremely smelly aspects of that part of the process; between the paint and glue and the other amazing material required to pull off the illusion of life, it could really only be done when the weather was cool enough to have the windows open for ventilation. Otherwise, we’d both be on the couch until the fumes completely dissipated.
The other part was the sudden appearance of a water leak in that side of the bedroom; we have a flat roof on our home, and if we’re not careful, the scuppers can become clogged with leaves or other items. When that happens, the water backs up and then tries to find another way out — which, in this case, happened to be the wall of our bedroom. Repairing the problem forced me to move the layout, which underscored how it wasn’t exactly in the right spot to begin with. Ultimately, I broke down the framework and then sold what I had done so far on the layout, though I did keep the trains, track and other items I had collected for use on it. For in the back of my head, I always assumed I’d try the project again.
Spending time with my father this past May working on his current layout cemented the notion that I wanted back into the hobby, so I whispered my desire to Santa Claus; working in tandem with my wife, he came through for me this Christmas with the latest iteration of the same kit I’d started nearly twenty years earlier.
I was rather amazed the kit was still available, though not so much at how much more expensive it was this time around. Still, having everything in a single kit definitely makes the basic part pretty straightforward, especially since I really don’t have the space or tools to do any true woodworking. Since I kept all of the buildings and scenery from the first kit, I’m actually slightly ahead, though all of that still needs to be built. I also have a better plan for the track; I use Kato’s Unitrack, an extremely flexible plug-and-play option that keeps people like me from having to do any sort of messy electrical work. My father is a whiz at that kind of thing; me? Well, let’s just say there’s a reason I went into Computer Science and not Electrical Engineering.
If you’ll forgive me, I plan on posting every now and again about this project as I work through it over the coming months. I’m not sure it will be as detailed as the layout I featured in Vengeance, but there is a part of me that is thinking about making the small city portion of this layout look a bit like the main drag of Windeport — or at least the way I picture it in my brain. As this is more of a mountainous layout, sneaking in the ocean might be a bit hard, but then again, I can perhaps hint at it a bit in one corner. Maybe a long pier? One that hosts a small tacky tourist restaurant with views of the harbor?
You never know.
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