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The N Scale |
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Model Railroad |
Chapter 7: WR&N Version V
A brief visit to the funny farm
By the end of 2000 my life was quickly unraveling. On the one hand, I'd finally achieved a notable level of success as a model railroader; on the other, I was a failure at the more important things in life: still unable to find full-time work, I was becoming convinced that I was unemployable, not to mention unfit to be a husband. I was a two-time divorcee living on credit cards and mac-and-cheese dinners—a real sad sack.
Originally the condo was to be a temporary living space—five or six years at the most, with plans to build my own home. But within the first three years, the property value took an unexpected nosedive, and I wound up owing more on the condo than it was worth. Between negative equity and mounting debt, I was trapped. So I resigned myself to the fact that I would be there for a very long time indeed, perhaps permanently.
At first I was going to completely fill the second bedroom with a new around-all-walls design. But living alone in an unstable emotional state can give rise to some spectacularly bizarre behavior. Thus it came to pass that I decided to turn the dining and living rooms into a 15 x 24 foot layout room. I erected some permanent walls, doors and dividers to isolate the space from the kitchen and foyer, installed lighting and sky backdrops, and, tapping lessons learned from the floating doughnut idea, began erecting elaborate benchwork made from steel two-by-fours.
As it happened, the new layout room served as an ideal holding area for the NMRA convention tours, giving the sixty-odd visitors something of interest to study while groups of six or seven at a time were herded into and out of the bedroom. With the kind assistance of Rich Laube, tours were kept to a strict timetable so that everyone got a chance to see the WR&N. By the time the tour was over, I was physically and emotionally exhausted.
Then I snapped completely. My life in shambles, I'd lost interest in everything, and in fact almost everything around me had become a painful reminder of the good life I had that would never be again. I began a kind of bulimic purge: I threw out almost everything. Thousands upon thousands of slides, hundreds of hours of videotape, crates of magazines and prints—I filled a dumpster three or four times over. The half-assembled benchwork for the fifth WR&N was next, as I literally ripped it from the walls in a blind rage. Last came the WR&N IV. Most of the structures were carefully removed and donated to Rick for the Sceniced and Undecided; a few of the small detail items were tucked away for some rainy day in the far-flung future; the rest became more dumpster fodder.
This is why some of the pages of this website are so thin on images and documentation—in particular, there is not one photograph of this version of the WR&N. Most of what has survived did so because it was simply lost amidst the remaining litter, rediscovered after I'd finally patched my life back together and moved out of the condo.
Copyright © 2006-2008 by
David K. Smith.
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