My interest in photography is what brought me into model railroading as I needed some sort of diorama for a night school project. Then as I became more involved I used the hobby to teach my children things like basic electricity, woodworking, and logical thinking. I was mostly "N' scale at the time and my daughter loved the electronics part and built a lot of signal boards, controllers, lighting systems, etc. When she started high school there was an electronics program where she was the only girl. That worked into a college scholarship and she went on to a nice career. My son was a creative modeler and also loved running operations. There was an old guy at the local club who bragged about how nobody could beat his time in the timesaver switching puzzle,.. My son watched for a while until he had his opportunity to try,.. ten year old made fast work of the expert. After that I did some redesign on my shelf layout and incorporated timesaver into my industrial areas, two of them were exactly the same so we could compete (he always won). Having the layout in the house with no basement it wasn't something where we could stick a few boards together and it be ok with the lady of the house. So everything was build as nice wood furniture, everything was nicely joined, front edges were trimmed, stained, and polished, same with the valance. We made custom etched switch plates for the controls and snap bottom covers to hide all the wiring, etc. Today my son builds specialty furniture.
Kids have all grown and have their own families, the old house is gone and the layout with it. Most of it found a good home with other modelers. Today I'm a Lionel carpet runner, no space to build what I would like. But the grandkids like the nice long trains that run loop to loop in the TV room and on occasions take a run down the hallway (temp) and into the master bedroom to another temporary loop and back. I'm thinking of creating a timesaver style switching puzzle, probably have to build a cabinet which would need to be large to accommodate "O" scale, perhaps I might just it in HO.
