Yay Me!

For the first time since...well, for all practical purposes since I moved into my new house, the one I got because I would have a train room...I have a train room!

Let me digress.

I bought the house in 2005 after retiring from the Navy. At the time there was me, my wife and our adopted 5 year old son. The house has four, count 'em, four! bedrooms, which means one would be a guest room and the other would be my train room.

It stayed the train room for a couple of months until my middle daughter moved "home" to occupy the "guest room" and my oldest son moved "home" to occupy my "train room". The 4'x8' layout I had at the time moved into the bonus room, a 13'x10' room off of the master bedroom that also housed my wife's crafts, and there it languished before finally being disassembled in August 2015. More on that later.

In June of 2010 tragedy struck. I lost my wife of 16 1/2 years to lung cancer. Trains understandably took a back seat for a while (as can be evidenced by the lack of posting in 2011), and then there was a new convertible Mustang to play with, but after a while I returned to trains.

In 2013 Middle daughter, who had moved out, gotten married, had a baby and moved back in, went with her new husband to Florida, and the room that she and her small family had occupied was suddenly empty. I could have moved the trains in there I guess, but at the time I still had the large table and the room arrangement wasn't right for trains. So it became my office instead.

This started a trend; since I only had the two boys left at the house, and since one was in his 30's and the other was rapidly approaching 18 and thus adulthood, I made it well known that in May of 2017 (Youngest Son's birthday is in late April) I would be done raising children. They would all have to find someplace else to be (except the 18 year old providing he stayed in school); the First National Bank of Dad would be permanently closing its doors and Occupy Dad's House would come to an end.

In July of 2014 I won a Life-Like CB&Q train set with an SD9 locomotive, so I started on a new smaller 8'x2' made up of two 2'x4' tables, based on my little hometown of Clarinda IA (although the way it is evolving it won't have much more than the basic track layout in common  with its prototype). I also acquired some Z scale with the intentions of converting it to Nn3 but it is just too damn cute to do that (plus the size and spacing is all wrong). I had also begun a 2'x4' rock quarry layout (an idea that I might yet revisit later on) using a Bachmann 4-4-0 set.

So, at the end of 2014 I had the 8'x2' N scale Clarinda layout and a smaller 2'x4' N scale rock quarry layout residing along the long wall in the 13'x10' bonus room. The 4'x8' that was never really done was in the center of the room, mostly in the way, and there was also a 3'x5' Nn3 layout (mostly just track and FastTracks turnouts on a board) on top of it that I worked on from time to time.

Then, in February of 2015 something wonderful happened. She is an elementary school teacher who's name was hard to say so her kids mispronounced it as Mrs Hades. We were married in October of 2015. It was a very good year.

During the course of that year Mrs Hades decided that since she was now in an administrative position on the PVRR, and since the railroad had been running (or not running, as the case may be) at a loss as evidenced by the sad and sorry state of the 4'x8' layout, it was time for some downsizing so she could "re-purpose" half of my "train room" for closet space.

So, as previously mentioned, the 4'x8' was disassembled in August of 2015. The Nn3 layout that had previously resided atop the big table was banished to the office closet, and, due to the dismal running qualities of the Bachmann locomotive the rock quarry layout was abandoned. It was disassembled and a smaller Z scale "layout" was begun, consisting mostly of MicroTrains Z scale roadbed track on top of the foam. This became a dual-purpose Nn3/Z scale "layout" since the Nn3 was removed. The Clarinda layout became the main focus and the space formerly occupied by the large table became closet and Mrs Hades knitting space.

Eldest Son had been busy since 2013, taking to heart the admonishment that Occupy Dads House was no longer going to be an option. He got motivated and decided to make something happen with his life rather than waiting for someone else to do it. Now gainfully employed at a regular job, with a steady paycheck and benefits and everything, he made plans to find his own space and executed those plans this past weekend.

Which brings me back to the opening line of this post; since the room he had been occupying was formerly my train room it will once again become so. This should give me plenty of room for all my trains and train related materials and will also clean out the "bonus room" closet for Mrs Hades. At long last the PVRR will have its own undisputed space!

Since I have also finally become active in my local N scale club I am going to start building T-TRAK modules, with a twist: I'm going to put some elevated narrow gauge on it using Rokuhan roadbed track. Now that I have a train room I will finally have space for that to happen. Yep, the PVRR is going to go in a new direction...we're going mobile!

The carpet has been taken up, new flooring is planned, and the paint has been purchased.