I got my 1st N Scale set in 1969 or 1970. I remember it had a 0-6-0 steam engine. Minitrix I think. Into the 70's I got a 4X8 table & did my 1st layout. All that room & better trains were coming out. Atlas, Arnold, etc. After my divorce, I found 2 boxes of my trains. I had nothing to do, so I set them up on my kitchen table. They still ran after almost 30 years! One day on my way to work, I stopped by a hobby shop to reacquaint myself with the hobby. I saw this really nice looking NS engine from a new to me maker, Kato. I picked out another couples of engines to see how they ran. The 1st one was the NS engine. Am SD-80. When the guy put power to it & the bright lts & ditch lts. came on, I was hooked! It was so quiet & ran so smooth. $600.00 later, & another $400.00 2 days later, it has been the best decision I ever made. Yeah, I've spent a ton of cash on my obsession, but I've made a lot of true friends through this. Friends that were there for me when I got sick. Friends that are here for me now. This website also has been a great find. It really helped me through tough times. As I say, this is the best on the web.
A little HO as a teenager in the `70's, then nothing until I got into N-Scale in 1999. It was the fine detail, realism, and quality that peaked my interest and still does. If it all still looked liked toy trains I wouldn't have bothered.
My beginnings with N scale in the early 1980's was pretty close to ending in the mid 1980's. Some of those poor running models were purchased with my limited funds... and deciding to buy diapers and baby formula was first and foremost on my mind. The purchases were heavily curtailed until the mid-1990's when my son and I joined a model railroad club which had an N scale layout. I missed out on a lot of the good running early Kato diesels from the late 1980's to early 1990's. I did get the D&RGW Atlas/Kato runs. Those Kato and Atlas/Kato model really helped keep me in. I also got some good looking Kadee/Micro-trains from the mid 1980's which showed my how 'lame' my rolling stock was from other manufacturers. Good thing the knuckle couplers were pushed forward by the N scale community... Rapido couplers... BLAHHH!
I didn't convert to N scale until 2006 - a decade ago. Since the '80s, I loved the small size of N, and the potential it brought, but the toy-like quality (and higher prices at the time) kept me from switching. In the 2000s, Rapido couplers were going extinct, and innovations like body-mounted couplers, low-profile metal wheels and prototypical ride height were starting to emerge, thanks to visionary companies like BLMA, ExactRail, Trainworx, Wheels of Time, Red Caboose and Deluxe Innovations. And I was beginning to see the availability of N scale models that were the same as the HO trains I was starting to sell off. Not to insult anyone here, but I have absolutely no fondness nor nostalgia for any N scale made before the 1990s (I'm glad there are people that do like it, because someone has to ). In fact I have a "nothing manufactured before 1990" rule on my layout.
