This part of my web site will document my newest hobby - model railroading. Eventually the photo gallery will become the biggest part of the site. There will also be pages added as I go along, explaining the process. I hope the end result may not only show what I have built but might even be helpful to someone starting out - much like the help I have so gratefully found on-line as I am trying to build my dream. While on the one hand I want to share what I have learned so that others just beginning can learn from my mistakes and successes, I do not want to reinvent the wheel. There is a ton of information already available on the internet and in books on every aspect of model railroading. That in mind, I will not go into great detail on what is already easily available. I will instead focus my detailed writing on specific things that are perhaps a bit uncommon, explaining some of the decisions I had to make along the way, and I will give you a list of links to some web sites that I found very helpful as I was beginning and trying to understand the many aspects of this fascinating hobby. How It Began Receiving a gift certificate from my wife for Christmas of 2009 really started the process of my gathering what I needed to get started and setting about to plan my layout but while that may have been the "official" birth of my model railroad phase of life, the seed of this model railroad passion had been planted some 50 or more years prior to Christmas 2009 and although it begged for attention on numerous occasions I had always done the "reasonable thing" and managed to, with many varied excuses, bury it under that old, frayed carpet of "adult responsibility". The fact is trains have always been a very real part of my life. I lived my very early childhood in Glace Bay, Cape Breton, a mining town and when I was five years old I could look out my front window and watch the coal trains shunting back and forth in the field just on the other side of the road. After we moved from there I spent many of my summers walking the old abandoned rail line to pick berries or to take the shortcut to the other end of town. I spent many summer days playing on the hill that was actually an old slag dump from a nearby abandoned mine. Trains, tracks, rail cuts, tressles and rail bridges were a very real part of my world all the while that I was growing up. Although I had built models of cars as a youngster and had various building sets (like Meccano), I never owned a real train set. When I left Sydney at age seventeen I went by Canadian National "Dayliner" - an RDC-3 unit that served the Halifax to Sydney route. As an adult I lived for many years just across the street from a rail line used primarily to move vehicles carriers from our nearby Auto-Port and oil tanker from a nearby refinery. I walked the tracks to the downtown and back almost every day. I made many trips from Halifax to Montreal and most of the those trips were by VIA rail. On days that were not busy I loved to sit and watch trains shunting and assembling in the Dartmouth railyard - a 10 minute walk from my house. I have lived my whole life near railways and trains. One other event came into play. At Christmas time 2008 Ruth had bought a toy train set from Sears. It is close to HO scale but not intended to be accurate. We were going to use it under the Christmas tree with the 24 inch diameter track but the fact that the area under the tree is normally where we stash our Christmas gifts, and the fact that our cat would have a grand ol' time with a train at his level weighed into the equation and the train set was never used. As decorating time for Christmas 2009 was approaching I considered using the toy train set again, now that we had moved and had a new tree, but we still wanted to use the area under the tree for stashing the gifts and we still had the cat. The next logical conclusion was to set up the train in the den on a table. I had bought enough extra track at Sears to make a 24 x 42 inch oval. My intention was to use one of our three sets of Christmas village and make the train run around the town. I set up the folding table and immediately realized that it occupied far too much space in our little den. With disappointment, the train set did not see service again this year. It was packed away with the intention of somehow using it under the tree next year. Having had the train set out of the box again, I once again thought it might be nice to have a real train set but much smaller so it could be left up and runing all throughout the year. I must have either muttered that out loude (as I am prone to wandering about talking to myself when I am in deep thought) or else Ruth read it in the disappointment on my face but one thing led to another and before you know it was mid December of 2009 and, Ruth, at the time recovering from cancer surgery and having to do her Christmas shopping on-line for the most part, bought me a gift certificate from an on-line vendor of model railroad "stuff" - everything from layouts to scenery to engines to rolling stock, to buildings, cars, trees and even tiny plastic people. So when folks ask, "Why would any sane (okay, that is still up for debate) fifty-seven year old retired man finally give in and become a child again, losing himself in such a completely self-indulgent hobby as to pretend to be building some personal corner of some great national dream?" I would simply answer, "Why not?" After all, I came to realize a long time ago that passions are not to be rationally explained - they are simply to be enjoyed. Come On In My model railroad will depict a typical small town as could be found anywhere in Nova Scotia back about a generation ago. The era is 70's to 80's ... back when small towns still thrived. It was a time before the highways killed the "slow road" that passed through many small towns and before the big box stores and super malls killed "Main Street". It was a simpler time of life. Entering the "Middletown" site you will leave Dave's Park but there will be a link on all pages to bring you back, whenever you wish. Thank you! Enter here ...