When we were putting away the Christmas stuff from 2008, Mary found the remnants of my old N-gauge train set - the buildings, mostly, which hadn't really been set up in 20 years. She suggested that we build a "Christmas village" for the next year.
Well, Mary lost interest after a bit and I did too, until just before Christmas, when my work was closed for the week and I had nothing to do.
At that point, I decided to get busy and, with help from Mike, I pulled together a four foot long layout - just big enough to sit on the bricks in front of our fireplace. The buildings were all from my 20 year old layout, except for the "Cricket Shirt Factory" and one of the row homes. (Actually, all the row homes are 20 years old, I just never assembled one of them.)
For 3 days work with a soldering iron, I'm pretty happy with how it turned out. I knew from my old layout that the tracks would have to be soldered and filed or else the trains wouldn't stay on the tracks. I worried about that a bit because I'm terrible with a soldering iron, but I managed to get it all done without to many burns in the foam-rubber "rail bed". The layout has two independent ovals - the inner "commuter" track and an outer "freight" track and switches that allow trains to move from one track to the other.
I'm also really happy with how easy the "snow" was to apply.
