Just getting started with G scale in CO

Hi all,

I'm the dad of a very small train nut and it seems to be contagious. (c:

My son (almost 3), has been utterly fascinated with trains since around his first birthday and can now identify a wider variety of rolling stock than most adults as well as correctly identify many of the local road names. He is happy to spend (literally) hours at the local light rail station waiting for freight trains on the Colorado Joint Line and waving at the engineers. I think most of the commuter rail drivers recognize us and I think some of the regular BNSF crews have begun to remember us too. If he is left alone in an otherwise trainless room for any length of time, the furnishings will soon be arranged end to end and he'll be sitting on whatever happens to be at the front.

Since he shows no sign of forsaking this love (while other concurrent interests have come and gone) we have resigned ourselves to the inevitability of a garden railway. The inevitable is upon us sooner than we planned in the form of a USA Trains GP9 Christmas present from Grandpa. We scrounged a power supply/controller and a 6' dia. oval of track from Ebay to get us by for now but we've got a small house and it's gotta get outside soon. However, there are some considerations we need to work out before we start work on the outdoor line we have in mind.

The first factor, is that this train is (officially) for my son who takes a very pragmatic approach to toys. (I'm afraid he got it from me.) He currently has an amusingly long and nearly worn out Fisher Price circus train compiled from what my wife and I each still had from childhood, a dangerously large amount of wooden trains and track, and I brought out my old Lionel set for a while (but it is in need of more electrical refurb and TLC than I'm willing to invest in what would only be a "transitional" gauge). He expects his trains to actually haul things; real things and preferably freight. The downfall of the Lionel set was the fact that the tired old motors and long-stored track weren't up to the task of pulling my small collection of rolling stock loaded with all the wooden blocks and hefty impromptu freight that he could fit on and in them. We quickly packed up the Little People since they were quickly discarded in favor of blocks, wooden train track, shoes, dirty laundry, or whatever he could find to fill the cars to capacity and pull them around the house making all the appropriate noises and saying, "look this, Dada. It a souf bound toe (coal) train." As I am writing said circus train just came through with a load of dog food (hopefully) bound for the dog's dish ...it was. The wooden trains are quite frustrating for him as he expects to pull relatively prototypical lashups (imagine 3 ft. of magnetically coupled wooden locos and rolling stock) across notoriously tight curves, impossible grades, and sloppy joints & switches. His toys earn their keep and I can't foresee being able to enforce a strictly purposeless play policy on such a tantalizingly realistic setup.

The next consideration is in how my wife and I have decided to accommodate our son's pragmatic play (which we encourage). We have a small urban lot, most of which either is or is slated to be devoted to intensively cultivated urban farming. We have set aside a portion of our back yard for play space and "just for pretty" but it is too small to accommodate anything more than a disappointingly simple point to point line without some impractically tight curves. So we've decided to build (over time) a truly working railroad that serves the operations of a small urban farm. In terms of what type of railroad to model (since we can't let it be purely functional), the ultimate goal is to depict a small community of little people who live in economic symbiosis with the big people (us) by operating a (very) local freight service; sort of a settled version of the Borrowers.

We're just getting started and intend to start very small and expand over the course of years but I can't afford (time OR money) to invest in things that work for now but won't later. I want to make sure that the small scenic layout we start with will still be serviceable for general use as we expand into the fun but improbable realm of hauling tomatoes to the kitchen, beets to the cellar, feeding the chickens via covered grain hopper (wet chicken scratch won't dump), or hauling freshly forged hardware to the front porch for transfer to another carrier such as USPS. Heck, I've even got a scheme brewing in the back of my mind for transporting (from the hives), processing, and packaging honey with custom made/modified tankers and an automated processing facility in the basement. Maybe I'll leave that to my son to design and build when he's older. (c:

So, now that you all know for certain that a lunatic has joined the forum, I'm looking forward to learning as much as I can about grade and curve limitations, weight capacity, truck and wheel wear, coupler choices, power options, loco choices, and anything else that I might need to keep in mind while developing a ridiculously tiny real freight operation.

See you all in the forums!

 

Welcome to TrainBoard. Your sons start in model railroading reminds me of my own, I too was 3 when I received my first Lionel 027 train set. Been model railroading ever since. Enjoy the hobby.