What’s the best part of a large layout? The variety – you can work on anything from benchwork to scenery to wiring as interest dictates. What’s the worst part of a large layout? The variety – you can work on anything from benchwork to scenery to wiring as interest dictates.
The problem of
course, is while you get a lot of variety you can really only do one thing at a
time. Too many things half-done means nothing looks finished. Potential large
layout builders heed my words – the lack of focus caused by having too many
things started and nothing finished has killed off lots of large layouts and is
nothing to sneeze at!
Enough editorializing.
In an effort to overcome the “everything started nothing
finished” syndrome I’ve decided to focus my attention on the structures in and around
Waterbury. Why? Well, several of them are “half-started” and I have the
information necessary for most of them. Perhaps most important Waterbury is the
first scene you see when you come down the stairs into the layout area. Finally,
this Phil Hasting’s photo of Waterbury is the one image that got me started
modeling the CV of the steam era.
We’ll get started with the feed mill visible to the right in
this photo. Here's what the same feed mill looked like the first time I saw it (sometime in the late 1980s, as I recall).
Marty,
ReplyDeleteI hear you loud and clear with regard to the dilution of effort effects of a large layout. I'm sure your regular blog postings are helping you establish and maintain focus, as my own blogging is doing for me. I have had times over the past year when I got out to a week and a half since the last bi-weekly post and developed enough focus to get something "reportable" (via the next blog post) completed. I appreciate your efforts to now focus on a specific scene of your layout for a period. I look forward to your future postings!
Bill Decker
http://espeecascades.blogspot.com/