3 BIG MISTAKES I see Model Railroaders make ALL THE TIME

1: spending more than they should
2: don't make plans
3: have the entirely wrong hobby

All true what you're saying. I'm going through these phases right now. I'm at the brink of starting my project 'concrete jungle', after years of collecting out dated analog Roco, Märklin and Fleischmann gear. The decision taken last november my first purchase was a modelling simulator. That earned it's money by giving direction to my whishes and needs and taught complete ignorant me some basics and reality. Now after 4 months and dozens and dozens of all kind of different designs and adjustments I made up my mind and the hunt for specific needs [ao a pile of Märklin bridgeparts] began. In the mean time I layed down a simple double oval on the track table just to bide the time, enjoy my rolling stock, teach myself and prepair. I reckon laying a clean and smooth running <60+ mtr first part will most likely take months though the track is flat. Patience is mandatory as trying and failure are. Knowing your limitations too [me avoiding electrical issues amap by independent tracks -3/english crossings]. But it's definitly worth it. Impatience is the road that leads to frustration, regrets and more work. Sometimes I wonder what the hell was I thinking? -;)

I built my first big ho layout with poor planning. I isolated myself from an entire side of the layout and made it very difficult to access portions of the layout. I built one entire section up against a wall. I have a much better layout built and can easily access all areas of the layout.

Great video

I spent 13 years of grade school in special ed, i wish I could buy patience in a pill form😅

Too many points.Bench too wide.Double track,when single will do.Not enough industries to switch.Too much focus on looks,instead of reliable running.

Couldn’t agree more. Part of the joy for me was to scrounge as much as possible, recycle materials, find gems at train flea markets and put together a dream layout for as little as possible. There is also a lot of reward in repairing things. Well done.

Your comments are spot- on. I hope many listen and learn the easy way. You point of this hobby being a balance between; tug-of-war between time, Space& money. I'm lucky to have the space in a spare garage and time, because my wife supports me & my hobby, money was by the hour, like so many. A few weeks ago, after 11 years on the job, the boss walked in and said sorry but your involvement is at an end, just like that I was laid off! ! Now I have more time, but keep running into that coinless wall. Going to continue my build one way or another( legal means).😊😊

Model Railroad Academy will let you sign up for $1.49 but beware they will charge you the full $80 renewal price before your first 365 days are up.

I have to laugh at all the comments missing the point. This isn't about what kind of layout you should make, or the "right" or "wrong" way to enjoy the hobby. It's about basic fundamentals that might keep you from achieving the goals you set for yourself, with whatever methods you use. I'd add to the "impatience" category: not letting things dry. Glue, paint, plaster, whatever.

The biggest mistake that I ever made was to read about John Allen, see his workmanship and think.....I can do that.

The One with the epa water doesn’t really make that much sense because you can just make it yourself

IF YOU want to work on your layout..
'if you ever ever believe one thing ' DO NOT DO NOT GET INVOVED LET ME REPEAT "DO NOT GET MARRIED"...FOR YOUR LAYOUT WILL PAY FOR IT...I FAILED TO LISTEN TO MY OWN INFORMATION..I PAID FOR IT LOST AREA OF LAYOUT COST IN MONEY OF EQUIPMENT....MY PART LEFT IS IN CLEAR PKG CANTAINERS IN BASEMENT..
OH BEFORE ENGAGEMENT SHE LOVE THE TRAIN LAYOUT ..AFTER MARRIAGE SHE HAD TO HAVE THAT SPACE FOR HER ITEMS..." OK YOU BEEN TOLD SAVE YOUR LAYOUT DON'T DO IT..."..YOU BEEN WARNED

One of my pet peeves is painted backdrops with cotton ball clouds and no perspective. Like the backdrop in this video.. awful.

For me you missed the number one mistake that I see all the time, including in your video. If you want your railroad to be successful, you must start on a good, solid foundation. Learn a bit about carpentry. We need to discourage modelers from building on expanded polystyrene sheets. That stuff breaks up so easily that I won't even use it for scenery formers.
By the way, I am 74, been in the hobby since I was 8 and I have always been a crammer. There's never enough space for everything, especially track.

bravo. Very succinct

Another common mistake I see is that modelers don't ask whether the scenes they compose make sense in the real world. It drives me crazy when someone builds a bridge over the edge of a lake, when everyone knows that a real railroad simply would shift the roadbed to the side of the lake to avoid building the bridge. Another example is when modelers put billboards in places where no pedestrians or drivers will see them. We always need to ask ourselves: "What's wrong with this picture?"

Basically this kind of pure bullshit talk ("planning" like a bureaucrat) is the prime killer of any hobby. It's leisure time, it's fun. To the hell with any "planning". This guy seems to lack any challenge in his job or private life and so is in desperate need to "lecture" us. You may "plan" your tasks in real life. If you approach your hobby in this way, you better look for a second paid profession. I invest money in my model railroad to handle it just as I feel comfortable with it, every day, and there is no "mistake" whatsoever in spending time and money for having a good day. I do not need "lessons". Such advice fit a communist party clerk's thinking. Forget them, the sooner the better.

My #1 mistake is not having the space to do the layout I want to do.
So...my stuff only sees the light of day when the x-mas tree is up. 😒

I have zero knowledge of what I'm doing. Everything seems to be just thrown together. I think I bought too many structures without any plans. Got too many good deals on E-Bay. Now I'm left trying to figure out with ones to box up again.

What type of glue do you use? I’m not as skilled. I’m thinking of using grass mat and/or gravel mat and/or asphalt mat, because laying down powder grass or gravel is messy.

Good lessons. I like the one about having a plan. I build small models of the complete layout using paper and modeling clay for the scenery and drawing the tracks in. Just use a scaled down version of the full-size layout. Make it about a half inch or 1 inch to the foot scale. Basically a scale model of a scale model. If you want to build a 4x8 foot layout in one inch scale then you need a piece of stiff paper with a 4x8 inch grid marked on it. Then build your layout on this paper. If you don't like the plan just toss it and make another one. You can make models of very large and elaborate layouts using large sheets of poster board that you can get at places like Hobby Lobby.

Jimmy. What address to send coffee

Would be interesting to have a conversation with you, a lot of comments and sharing could happen here.

90% of the video is the guy's face.

Ich verstehe nur Bahnhof 😢

In essence you need to have Project Management skills ! And these applies to all of those three "mistakes". You need to have a Project Management Plan and handle the constraints (Scope, TIme, Money + Resources (Space) ) properly...

The most common mistake is having ultra tight radius curves - that are just not realistic. Real world rail lines never have tight curves. Model rolling stock should also not accelerate and run at high speeds.

Hi, subscribed to your channel😉 How do you insert the Italian audio language into the video?



This is a whole different world to what I'm planning to do, that being, clean out an entire room, put up a bunch of 8 foot folding tables that we have in the barn, then build one hell of a wild track spanning the entire room with whatever I want arranged around it. Old metal dollhouse? Sure! Old metal matchbox garage? Sure! Big ceramic lighthouse? You bet!

I'm basically going to replicate the wild setups I used to build with thomas the tank engine battery powered trains as a kid, but bigger, and with electricity. A universe in which a steam engine towers over tonka trucks and yet is dwarfed by a house filled with plastic furniture, a world in which a lighthouse stands tall on dry land with water nowhere nearby, a world in which a bunch of stuffed ponies straddle the track because why not include those guys too?

And if I do want to shoot for realism, or something approximating it, I can always employ the 9 billion Fontanini village buildings that my grandma has in storage, and have the train arranged around those. That'd probably look kinda cool, though the scale would mean the train is about the size of a large dog compared to all of the buildings...

Have a plan and a budget. Then be practical and not annoying. If you have a family limit the Railroad time and area. Trains don't need to take over your family time , free time, or every inch of your House. Especially the bathroom like i see idiotic people wanting to run trains while in the bathroom...Grow up!

Excellent advice....I'm just starting out, but not a total newbie.
I smiled a few times from your tips because I totally caught myself in all your tips.....best advice, take your time...do it once, do it right....or at least try 🙂

Even though I'm still a novice when it comes to model railroading, I think I've more or less avoided these three pitfalls in terms of my current (first) layout.

1. Patience--I've spent 6+ years designing and building my current layout, and while it's still not complete, I'd rather it be done right than done right now.

2. Planning--The folks at my model railroad club have told me it's best to focus on a specific railroad and time period so as to narrow down one's choices of locomotives/rolling stock/scenery/etc.

3. Not doing too much--It's an unfortunate instance in model railroading where hobbyists continue purchasing items for a layout that never ends up being built, and other modelers bite off more than they can chew in building a massive layout that becomes overwhelming. My layout is only slightly bigger than your standard 4 x 8 oval, and I plan on running 2-3 locomotives/trains maximum simultaneously.

About planning, now with many free web based CAD software, it's easy to make accurate plans. I use Solidworks for work, so that's what I used to plan my N scale shelf layout, but there's no reason to use the same ideas with other tools... I started with a rough plan of what I wanted and shopped for suitable kits to make the structures I wanted on the layout. When I had all the kits, I took a good look at them and reverse engineered the walls to see how to rearrange them. I inserted these CAD models in the layout CAD and could make tweaks to the layout and buildings simultaniously until everything fit good. It also gave me 3D perspective of how it would all look like in the end. I ended up with nice accurate plans of how to cut each walls for the kitbashed structures. As of now, all the buildings are mostly finished... All the walls are up and I put .060" styrene floors for bracing and semi-detailed interiors. What's left to do is some detailing and painting on each of them. When I look at the layout now, it's nicely balanced... looks busy but not crowded at the same time. There are a few key areas with neat little points of interest that will be perfect to set a small scene.

Now I'm craving a brew, one of those pale ales is mighty tempting!!!

I planned and built a dc layout that was 5" wide for a loop. I measured and calculated the ceiling where I would raise the setup out of the way. It was a multi-level setup with a cutout for a ceiling fan and an access porthole in the corner. Everything else I could reach. I planned and executed it really well. With wiring diagrams and landscape concepts. But I lacked time to spend on finishing it. Then I moved, so deconstructed it hahaha.

I just (almost) completed my project, and will speak to the patience part. I started with a WWII era Daylight consist (all 20 cars of it) with an old Bachman GS-4. It took me awhile to collect the all of the cars (there were some purchases that got sold later that would have been a bad fit), but I finally got everything. The next issue was where on Earth was I going to put a 17' long train (it grew to about 19' when I discovered that I could legitimately put a cab forward on as a helper). Thankfully, my boss thought it would be neat for me to put it in my office (I had zero intent to actually run the train anyway). My original idea was to just put up a shelf that fit the geometry of the wall behind and to my left. I couldn't really let it go at that, so I decided that I needed to make it look like it was on the mainline. Fortunately, my OCD-tendancies were satisfied when I found a particular section of track that fit my billing (it needed a 135 degree curve, needed to be long enough for the train, and needed to be uphill in the correct direction). From there, planned out everything that I would need to make it look pretty close to the actual location. As much as I wanted to rush through, I knew that I would be really unhappy with the results. So, I took my time, working here and there, ordering tools and supplies a needed (and waiting until I got what I needed). I did tests with static grass because I had never used it before. I read up on how to ballast and watched plenty of videos. I took a while to get the edge of the display to my liking (it's a bevel that mimics the actual topography), and changed techniques multiple times. It took me several months of construction, including times where I was too busy to work on it, but I am very pleased with the end result. As it turns out, I don't have enough track length to get the entire train on with the helper, but I can't do anything about the size of my office, and it gives me a reason to change up the consist from time to time. I only need to get some paint for the underside of the shelf and brackets (I need to match the wall color to get it to blend in) and put up the edging to hide the edge of the plywood. It took awhile, and I had to change course a bunch of times to get it just right, but the patience that I had to use was well worth the results.

I'm guilty of making all 3 of these mistakes & eventually got out of the hobby

I wished cars like auto racks and centerbeam cars could be shorter on ho scale to work on 18 radius curves sure there are box cars and tanks etc that are shorter. It seems that manufacturers of these longer cars only cater to those bigger layouts and bigger radius's but they don't consider making some of these cars and oh I forgot, also shorter coach cars. Is there a way to modify the length of longer to be shorter. Like a scale length of 85', actual approximately 11" to be like about 50-60' scale length works on 18 radius curves. Not everyone can have large layouts cause of space mostly so like I have a 4' X 10' Ho scale limits me to 18 radius curves. I woiuld like to have these other types of cars freight or coach and they be short enough to work on 18 radius curves.

Hi Jimmy, I recently bought 2 Kato locomotives. One KATO big boy and one Amtrack p42 starter set. The question is; must I lubricate them before use? Or are they lubricated at the factory?

Getting married, don't do it !

I can’t even count the mistakes I’ve made😂

Wow, this episode is a killjoy 😵‍💫

My Issue is planning. I work for the railroad, but I can't design a simple prototypical yard or customer to save my life. You'd think having unlimited access to the real thing would help, but I have dozens of drawings and computer designs, and I know all of the aspects that a yard or customer needs, I just can't seem to out it all together. Any tips with this info?

Hi Jimmy I know this question is a little off topic to this video. I'm just starting model railroading and I want to do a ddc++ with the arduino. Will that system accept any decoders that are in use. I'm starting with a 4x8 layout with ho scale trains. I'm a electrician and probably will be putting my own decoders in my trains. Thanks for reading this.

I definitely did too much my first 2-3 years but looking back, I wouldn’t change anything other than cutting back on some rolling stock.

I am a model railroader who uses wooden railway trains instead of electric trains. One big mistake that I made was that I was trying to get a bunch of switches for my layout on a tight budget.They were the type that didn't have any moving parts. That means that they give me no control over where the wheels go. So I'm replacing them with mechanical switches that do give me control. My life is easier now. Cory Mears

👍👍👍❤❤❤🚂🚂🚂

The first mistake is thinking you have enough money to realize what you want to do, and then having to fork another grand to do "some modifications"...