I had a browse through the hobbies and interests and only found a few mentions of model railways about 7 years ago, so thought it might be an idea to see if anybody out there is "playing trains" in their second childhood.
Like many others my first experience was a Hornby gauge 0 train set for Christmas when I was about 5, that lasted until I was about 15 when I discovered girls, then joined the RAF at 17 and 6 months. Next was when I had sons of my own, yep trainset for Christmas. Their interest didn't last as long as mine so not much happened until 1974 when my Father died and left me a couple of locos, some wagons and track; I left the RAF and we bought a house near mum.
Since then I've started a number of layouts, none of which got completed for one reason or another,like divorce, moving house marrying again, more house moves; one house we had a proper floor put in the loft and stairs up to it, all for the layout an L shape 17'x25' which in N gauge (scale of 1:148 about 2mm :1') is a lot of railway, after 5 years, redundancy so moved back to Dorset, luckily my wife still had a job and I had my RAF pension. A few small contracts and jobs kept us going until I retired in '99. I had managed to do a bit of modelling between jobs, I was able to do a bit more after retirement. My wife passed in 2008, I managed to keep the house going until about 4 years ago when I downsized to this retirement flat, not done much modelling in the last 18 months, lost my voice, turned out to be cancer on the vocal chord, a months rsdio therapy last May seems to have sorted that, but it knocked me back a bit. Maybe I'll start another layout!
My layouts have all been based on the Southern Railway as it was in the mid to late 1930s, I went to school alongside the Bournemouth - Weymouth line and discovered train spotting which has influenced my modelling.
A few locos, some bought ready to run, some built from kits others modified from what the manufacturers intended.