Nowadays my morning train routine consists of tackling whatever small details and decals are on the workbench while the espresso brews. Once I've had my latte I'll have to stick to larger, jitter-friendly tasks until at least after lunch But back when I had a proper layout it was usually an end-of-day affair. There was nothing like opening up the garage on a crisp fresh California evening, cold beverage in hand, and getting into the zen of scenery while the trains ran and the crickets sang. One of these days I'll get back to that...
No train routine for me other than turning to get a quick glance at the BNSF Temple Yard on my way home from work. When I get time and the mood strikes me I hop on Rail Modeler Pro to work on my layout design, but for now that's it.
No train routine. I get up, make some coffee, only a little orange juice to wash down my meds and that is breakfast. Hop on my bike and peddle 20 miles. Finish off the coffee. Hot on the colder days, over ice when it is hot. My modeling goes in fits and starts but when I am in the groove working on a project, I head up to the loft where the entrance to my train room is. I finished out a good chunk of the attic for the Nn3 layout that in have yet to build. We don't have basements in this part of Texas. In the train room is my work bench, drafting table, reference library, most of my trains and a test track on a hollow core door. Two loops of Kato Unitrak. Whichever train that I am working on is on one loop or the other so I fire up the power and run it in a circle for a while while I wait for glue to dry, paint to dry or decals to dry. Then back to work. Just now finally finished the final edition of my Sunset Limited that I started in 1994. Ready to take to the train show coming up in New Braunfels, Texas in a few weeks. I will take one of my NTRAK modules that normally is hanging up on the ceiling of the garage and hook that into the NTRAK layout at the show. Then I can run trains for two days till the next show.
I've had routines in the past. In the '70s I worked on an O gauge, mainly doing the wiring because I understood it and could do soldering. In the '90-03' I had a summer time O gauge outdoors and an interesting N gauge winding around my other hobby. Rebuilding computers and learning more of electronic toys. The trains wound there way around them. Then I had to move up here near Appleton, WI and no more carrier but tried going to HO and DCC.
no routine but, i really do need one. haven't touched the layout in 4 months. but i did start to reorganizing it a bit more, kinda clean up the mess.
I’m still in my working years, so what routine I have pretty much is in the evenings. We also live on seven acres, and raise chickens, so chores have a priority. I generally only have time to run trains for 15-30 minutes at night before going to bed. I have, in the past 28 months, however, found time to: 1. Finish the inner loop of a 2-loop layout. (Oval with kidney bend) 2. Lay down about 35% of the outer loop. (L-shaped) 3. Lay down most of the (small) yard. 4. Weather 50-60 cars, one bridge (but not mount it), and start on one loco. Airbrushing is done mostly outdoors on afternoons and evenings. I’ve put more time recently into the weathering than into the layout. I think it’s a progress thing - in a day I can show tangible progress on a car or batch of cars. In 2-3 days, I have newly weathered rolling stock to show for it. Tangible progress on the layout takes a good bit longer to achieve. I just need to bite the bullet and assemble and weather the remaining four(!) bridge kits needed for the outer loop. (Uuyyy! The first one took a month.)
