Seven months ago, I admitted that my Proto:48 Southern Pacific layout had stalled. I outlined the many reasons in that post, so I won’t repeat them here.
But since then, the layout has been greeting me every time I enter the room (which I do almost daily since it’s also where my home office is located). And I’ve spent a lot of time grappling with the question of its future.
It’s now the Canada Day long weekend and with some time on my hands I decided it’s been long enough: If I was going to continue building this project, I would’ve started back at it by now. Obviously, that’s not happened – so the SP is coming down.
Today, I scraped the roadbed and ties off a 12-foot-long peninsula and took down the benchwork:
I’ve set aside the peninsula (and its legs) and will use them to expand my Niagara St. Catharines & Toronto Railway layout beyond the Welland Avenue car barn.
Meantime, the rest of the SP layout – a 24-foot-long shelf mounted to the wall – will be scraped off and that space used to model the Great Western Railway in 7mm.
My SP equipment will find a home in a case, where I can continue to enjoy it. I do think it looks sharp.
This was a long time coming, but I wanted to make sure it was the right decision for me and my hobby. It was. Even the benchwork agrees:
The Model Railway Show 