My first HO layout

"Please excuse the crudity of this model" - 'Doc' Brown, Back to the Future

Warning: Painfully long post ahead, read at your own risk.

It's been nearly a decade since I started my first HO layout in late 2008. I learned a lot building it. A simple double-tracked oval might be ok for a beginner's layout, but I soon realised how little operating scope it had. It lasted until late 2013.
Anyways here's some photos, Apologies for the poor quality of some of them.

As I was 13 at the time, Dad helped me build the table, a simple 4X8 foot affair with folding trestle table legs screwed to the underside of the 9mm plywood. The table was originally stored leaning against the garage wall.

I don't seem to have any photos of my one of these, but it was my first (and for several years my only) loco. A Bachmann MDT Plymouth, a cheap loco that would be suitable for beginners, if it had decent electircal pickup as standard. The motor and drivetrain are decent, but it's let down by that piss-poor pickup. I later rebuilt it several times to improve it's pickup. I still have it, and it runs fairly well now with extra weight, LED headlight, minor weathering and extra pickups. Christ, how many times can one write "pickup" in a paragraph?

The first of the foam roadbed temporarily held in place with drawing pins. Yes, it's N scale stuff, the Toyworld I bought it from didn't have HO stuff. I soon learned I don't really like the foam, too soft and squishy, which I found to be a problem when nailing the track down and getting it secure.

First of the Atlas Code 100 track nailed down. I later sprayed the track with Tamiya Nato Brown, for a more realistic look than the standard track. Of course, it doesn't look quite right having wooden sleepers the same colour as the rusty rails, but it's a step in the right direction.

Some points were motorised.

It was a basic setup, but with Dad teaching me how to do it, everything eventually worked.

The buildings were plastic kits, most of them from Atlas and painted/assembled by me. All the greenery was carefully placed for the photos to cover up my numerous mistakes!

Note the Lego in the background, my younger brother and I shared a bedroom at the time, and Lego was one of our favorite toys for many years. Shit, I still use the stuff to make mockups, etc.

To explain the yellow tank that matches nothing else, I had just discovered the D&RGW narrow gauge, and was now nuts about it..

March 2011. Applying plaster cloth over styofoam and crumpled newsprint. Yeah I know, the shape of the terrain is awful. The "mountain" was later built up to improve its appearance. A fascia was also added because I put the track absurdly close to the edges of the table - should've made the table 2-3" bigger. Lucky I added those, they saved locos and stock from plummeting to the concrete floor on several occasions.
Note by now, the table is suspended from the garage ceiling with modified bicycle hoists. Dad was a bicycle mechanic.

I was less than dilligent in photographing progress, so now there's gaps in this "timeline" of the layout. Here, trees made from kits by Woodland Scenics (pines) and Hornby (deciduous) are ready for planting.

 

Not sure what I was thinking making the lakebed look like that.

Note the Pommy semaphore signals. Totally wrong for a Yankee themed layout, but back then I wasn't as anal about realism as I am now. I've always liked those signals - even today I think about putting them on my garden railway, even though they wouldn't be prototypical for the cane train theme either..

A DCC system was among a lot of HO & OO stuff given to me by some friends in the ride-on live steam club I was in at the time. I had test fitted the DCC gear, but never found a sufficient power supply. Little did I know, they are very easy to find on Evilbay. That said, I didn't really understand what DCC even was at the time, and just thought it must be better than ordinary DC. Each to their own, but even for my more recent HO layouts, old-fashioned DC control does me fine. The less electrickery I have to deal with, the better. I eventually sold the DCC gear..

 I picked a Bachmann Spectrum "Richmond Modern 4-4-0" for my 15th birthday present, my first steam engine. I think it was my 15th anyway.. It's still a part of the working fleet today, with some mods and detailing..

Lots of early attempts at detailing..

Some early kitbashing can also be seen here and there. The lakebed has been coloured with dark green ground foam to give the impression of depth.

I decided I wasn't happy with the "Pommy cattle wagon with the roof removed and filled with coal" I made for a coaling area, so I bashed one from some Airfix bits. Crushed-up real coal is the way to go. The water tank was off the layout to get some detailing. Note the hillbilly-type on the crude jetty. He got some painstaking surgery to make him into a guy fishing with a shotgun..

For a long time, my only rollingstock was a single 50' Athearn boxcar. I saw this Overton 34' baggage coach kit by MDC, at the local Toyworld. I kept an eye on it for months until I could afford it. $30 later and it was mine. 2011, I think this was. As of early 2018, it's a very weathered toolshed on the current layout. The bogeys and underframe are in service under another wagon.

Come 2012, the baggage coach was joined by a pair of Bachmann old west coaches. They were originally in Union Pacific yellow, but after a repaint, glazing and some peple crudely glued inside, I was quite happy with my passenger train. I'd also bought a 50' combine along with the Bachmann coaches, but the repaint didn't go well at all (numerous beginner's mistakes). No matter, that's how you learn. I later sold the combine and the coaches, I didn't like how high they rode, and wasn't confident enough to try lowering them.

A couple of mileposts were made from stuff in my parts box.

Always regretted leaving the 3 outside storage tracks unpowered. A dense barrier of trees separates the roundhouse scene from the station carpark under where the camera is.

The old drums were made from those crimped metal tubes that hold the eraser on the end of pencils, and some bits from Dad's junk jar.

Yeah, I did a real good job painting this one.. I didn't have fine enough brushes, the right colours of paint, nor the patience to leave it alone until I rectified that shortage of tools/materials.

 

 The water in the lake was done with Woodland Scenics EZ Water, a low-melt plastic-y resin type thing that comes in bags of pellets. You melt the stuff in a pan on the stove (not one you intend to use for food again) and pour it onto the layout.

I quickly wound up hating this stuff. Expensive, smelly and time consuming to melt, difficult (and a burning/melting hazard) to pour, loads of bubbles will get trapped in the translucent "water" as it cools and sets, ruining the effect. Another issue I had, that was my fault, was that because the table was suspended from the garage ceiling, the whole thing flexes quite a bit during raising and lowering. The EZ Water is very brittle, so I could add severe cracking to the list of problems with this stuff. I also made the lake way, way too deep, so I needed a shit-ton of this stuff to get the level of the "water" up to where I wanted it. I must've bought $150 worth of the stuff before I'd decided to dismantle the layout, and even then I hadn't quite built it up to where I wanted it. Subsequently, better results in modelling water were obtained with other products.

When the layout was dismantled, I chipped most of the water away and kept it to resell. Years of trying to flog it off for $25 hasn't worked - Feels wasteful, but I really should just bin this shit..

 Tree stumps were cut from a vine growing in the backyard. Never ended up using many of them though.

This station kit was one of the many things in the boxes of model stuff from my friends. I can't remember the brand, but it was some old German-made kit from the 1970s-80s, and was a bitch to build. I seem to remember the parts being very poorly fitting. Very frustrating when you're a perfectionist with little skill, but it came out okay-ish. One thing I did like, was that it came with a sheet of card with curtains and blinds printed on it, to put inside the windows.

The layout never saw a whole lot of running, because it was so limited in operation. Watching an electrically-powered train go round in circles gets boring real quick.

September 2013. The layout has been sitting for months pending the decision weather or not to scrap the current layout and start over, till now.

Very nearly everything was stripped from the table and a new smaller hole for a pond was cut out, as part of the new layout plan. The idea is to reuse the original table. The legs were also removed, to partially compensate for the weight of the scenery on the new layout, which will have a lot of hills and rocks. The layout will now sit atop a spare trestle table when it's in use.
A heavy subframe of 35X70mm timber will also be added to stiffen the layout and reduce the flexing.

90% of the track, scenery, buildings, details etc. will be refurbished and detailed to my current standards for reuse on the new layout.

The new layout is an adaption of John Allen's Gorre & Daphetid, a famous layout originally concieved in the 1940s. With modifcations to suit my needs, it should look real good and provide much more potential for operations..