How many layouts will I have to start before I finish one?

I'm doing this blog to document my fifth attempt at a model railway. Needless to say that the other four never got finished. My previous attempt probably came along the furthest before I lost interest.

This was attempt number four, which took a few years to get this far. I lost interest in it after a couple of years due to the lack of operational possibilities.

So, at the end of 2008 I tore it down, vowing to build something smaller that might actually get finished. I'm hoping that documenting its construction here might help to motivate me to work on the thing regularly. You never know, other modelers may actually read this and I might get some peer pressure

The story of the layout starts in 2009 and It's not finished yet. If you'll bear with me, I thought I'd document progress in a linear fashion and bring you up to date as time allows,

One of the big motivations for tearing down the old layout was that the family wanted that part of the basement back. Unreasonable, yes, but being the dutiful father and husband that I am I gave in. This left me with the prospect of a much smaller area to work with. You know those delusional people who tell you there's no such thing as a problem, only opportunities? Well, this left me with the "opportunity" to build a smaller layout, one that could conceivably be finished in a normal human life time.

So, what to build? My real railway love is for the "Banger" Blue era of British Railways in the late 70's and early 80's, the days of my yoof. My aspirations for a BR Blue layout are greater than my current modeling skills will allow. I wanted a simple project that I could use to reduce the level of hamfistedness in my modeling. The idea of a US outline layout was also appealing, after all I live here and am trying to learn what I can about US railroads.

I remember reading a series of articles on building a small layout by one of my favorite model railroading authors, Iain Rice. One of his suggestions was to build layouts that are real shelf layouts. That is, you use a space for an operating layout, but when you are ready you simply exchange this for another one of similar size, that is stored in a separate area, e.g. a shelf higher up. This seems like a good concept for me. Build a simple layout that would be fun to operate and that I could hone some modelling skills on. If I ever finished that then I could build a British outline layout of a similar size and store the first one on a shelf.

So, it would be a smallish, US outline shelf layout. The era would be diesel, as that's what I like. And it needed to be fun to operate!