What has gone before...

When I was in late grade school (what would now be called middle school), my grandfather bought a used train layout for me.  It was the (almost stereotypical) HO-scale double oval on a 4x8 piece of plywood with a reversing crossover and a single spur off of the crossover.  There was no terrain and the board was painted green to apparently pretend it was grass.

It was wired to run two engines.  There were two DC transformers (I don't think that DCC had been invented yet), and an array of the traditional Atlas flat buttons to manage the switches and the polarity for the reversing loop.  I was always ecstatic when I would successfully manage to take an engine from the outside loop to the inside loop, through the reversing track, and back out to the outer loop without having to stop the train. There were four or five running engines (mostly Santa Fe if memory serves) and a number of kits.  After I got into high school and didn't get out to his home very frequently he sold it, but I've still got an HO PRR K-4 kit from it (missing a couple of parts).

After college I got married, and several years later, a toy store in a local mall was closing.  I picked up a Bachmann N-scale Santa Fe oval set for almost nothing.  And so I was back after a hiatus of about 15 years.

Since space was always a precious commodity in our home, I stayed with N-scale. My first couple of layouts were ovals on two-by-four plywood using florist foam covered with plaster as mountains.  There was a tunnel.  There was a swamp.  There was a single turnout which simulated a branch line to a mine.  They weighed a ton because the plaster filled in the gaps between the foam.

The first model I built was the Model Power Old Coal Mine.  I've still got it in a box somewhere.

That was over 20 years ago.  And as the family accumulated more "stuff", space became even more precious.  Eventually even those small layouts wound up on the side of the road for trash pickup, after all the reusable parts were salvaged.  But that was done with no regrets.  I still had the interest.  I turned into a small-scale collector rather than a builder.  I occasioned model railroad shows and swap meets, picking up a switch here, a crossing there, one or two assorted pieces of rolling stock, and the very occasional building for future use.

Eventually I decided that I wanted to focus on the Pennsylvania Railroad during the transition era of the early 1950's.  I began picking up rolling stock appropriate to the era, trading or selling what wasn't appropriate.

And so the years went.