Unlimited Hobby Money

Thank you, Thank you. I went to a recent show and found a gentlemen selling use and broken tanker cars for a $1 or three tankers for $4 so I went rooting through his box and came out with a bounty of cars. My wife told me that this will keep me busy and right she was and your article was spot on.

Taking apart the cars and rebuilding them was great and I found that I put the "F" word back into the hobby,"FUN" putting the final touches on them was worth it. Thanks for the article.

Less can be More

Like a lot of modelers that existed in the armchair for many years - those years busy with military service, college, launching a career and family, etc. - I didn't have the space nor time to build a layout. However, from the early '90s until recently the amount of product produced by the hobby industry just skyrocketed from only a decade earlier. Like a kid in the proverbial candy shop I went on a bit of a collecting binge myself - amassing a sizable collection of HO equipment as the likes of Atlas, Kato and Athearn kept flowing product into my LHS.

Now having hit mid-life I've started to get serious about building the layout - an out-and-back branch with a semi-disguised continuous run option. Well, I started to unpack the collection and lo and behold I have far too much rolling-stock and locomotives for the size layout I am building - never mind the theme. The funny thing is after a couple waves of liquidating via eBay and Yahoo Groups I'm still at it - continuing to thin the herd. It's amazing what you can acquire over twenty-plus years between several manufacturers - so much I'll probably still be at it (selling, that is) well into this year.

I still have close to twenty brand-new engines and probably over a hundred cars to rid myself of - pouring the funds into constructing the layout as well as the general family budget. Once I'm done I'm looking at a roster of maybe 6-8 engines and close to a hundred freight cars - plenty to support the present plan including off-scene staging. Sure, it's rare that I actually recover more than I spent years ago but there is still a decent amount of cash tied up in those unopened boxes. Much better to reduce to a manageable fleet and layout than try to cram too much in anyway.

It's supposed to be a hobby, so my thought is less can be more - especially when you end up with an operable railroad instead of a collection of boxes full of boxes of miscellaneous models, all sitting idle in storage on shelves that were intended to support track and scenery - not stacks of corrugated cartons. I don't know about you, but I don't want my layout room remaining a defacto warehouse instead of its intended purpose - a dedicated room housing a detailed and functioning layout where I can run trains instead of just looking at them.

Time not money is my limited resource

For me the problem isn't money since over the last 40 years I've managed to accumulate quite a bit of stuff.  It's time that is limited for me.  So as much fun as fixing up old stuff or building kits can be, I'm more focused on getting the railroad running.  Railroad modeler or model railroader? It's choice I have to make and so I'm focused on the railroad - scenery and model building come later.

Enjoy

Paul

But time is money ... or it can be

But time is money, is it not? 

If you truly have enough money, then you can pay someone else to do the things for you that are taking your time, freeing you up to have the time you need.

But if you can't afford to pay others so your time is freed up, then it's also a limit of money, not time per se.

I think that's the point - limited resources like money can be a good thing, because that makes you focus on what really matters.

One benefit of focus, if you truly have tons of stuff, is you can take all the stuff you acquired before your new-found focus - take what's not appropriate now, and sell it, giving you some funds to possibly pay others to do the work so your time gets freed up some.

...

Money is the tangible physical storage unit for the intangible abstract idea, Time.

It is Colorless Manna, whereas products are colored manna:

In other words, 50 fish are 50 fish.   

50 dollars is 10 fish, 5 trees, 2 tires or 100 bricks. 

To make the stuff, you have to invest time.  Sometimes a little time, sometimes a lot of time.  But itn eh end, it's it time that makes money.

So money is just a physical means of transporting time.

Joe time may be money

but I for one have a ...urge?... that makes me spend maybe waaaay too much time on a project to -quote: "get it right" in my own mind.  I've hit ballast with tweezers to move a few single rocks because it looked great...but not from this angle...and that angle may not even be seen unless with a dental mirror!!  -This happened just today, but it's happened before...and probably will again.

On the other hand, with my limited knowledge (again, I know just enough to be 'dangerous') I can see an engine and want it for my layout then try and find out if it's prototypical or not.  Most maybe do it the other way around- have a protoype and match locos and cars accordingly, I think.

I guess the 'coin' is time and there are two sides to it- how we use that time is dependent upon what we deem the priority.

Quod Erat Demonstandum

Fact #1: Knowledge is Power
Fact #2: Time is Money
We know that: Power = Work / Time
And since Knowledge = Power and Time = Money
It is therefore true that Knowledge = Work / Money
Solving for Money, we get:
Money = Work / Knowledge
Thus, as Knowledge approaches zero, Money approaches infinity, regardless of the amount of Work done

http://calculus.nipissingu.ca/jokes.html   (about 1/2 way down the page)

Mike

A really tight hobby budget....

can be severely limiting.  I get the point of the article that it will help you to learn how to build things out of necessity.   I've built trestles out of bamboo skewers and wood matches before.  I even hand split the matches because they were too thick otherwise.  On the other hand it makes it tough to pursue the hobby when you can't afford to make more than maybe two major purchases in a year. By "major" I mean over 50 bucks or so and with the price of train stuff being what it is these days, that 50 bucks doesn't go far. A lot of you probably don't know what it's like to be on that limited a budget.

Michael

A really tight budget

Choices

I have a fairly generous hobby budget, but even at that, I have to make choices all the time.  Focusing on my specific area/locale has made some choices easier, but there are still difficult choices to be made and that is part of the hobby.  A little creativity and experimentation can go a long way.