Preparation begins

I'm going to interrupt the history here to start my account of building the new layout.  I'm getting behind on my posts while I'm distracted by documenting history and that's not a good thing!

Preparations for the new layout began in earnest starting in early November, 2020.  I followed three separate workstreams in parallel:

• Selling most of my Lionel Postwar collection
• Dismantling the Postwar layout.
• Planning the new layout

Selling my Lionel Postwar rolling stock and accessories

Son Zachary had been influencing me to move to Lionel Postwar from Railking equipment and had been buying his own trains from shows for about a year when in 2015 I decided to join him. I'll say more about how great that was in a later post.  Needless to say, with both of us into Postwar, our collections grew pretty rapidly. By November of 2020, my inventory had grown to over 270 pieces of rolling stock and accessories.  Zachary owned the track having made a deal with me when we converted from Railking.  I'd pay  for the infrastructure (lumber and materials) if he paid for the track.

Thinking that collecting Postwar might be decent investment, I had been meticulous about keeping an inventory of everything I purchased and sold.  It was time to leverage that inventory when i started the selling process. I knew how much I'd paid for each item and it's market value when I bought it and could easily tell if I was making or losing money on each item.  As usual, Zachary was ahead of me and, with prior permission, had commandeered the ping-pong table in the basement and set up a selling and packing process.

Prior, to this, I had been selling stock for the Twin Cities Model RR Museum (TCMRM).  I'd done it casually, one item at a time and didn't devote space for doing it.  It had cluttered up my office and I wasn't particularly motivated to bring home more stuff and add to the clutter. This state of affairs made me change my approach and I followed Zach's process.  Having a dedicated area, a simple end-to-end process and a goal to sell my collection by end of year 2020, I cut my minutes-to-sell each item from taking the photo to shipping it out the door from 30 minutes to 10.

By now, I've sold almost 200 items and collected enough money to pay for the new set up. I have been amazed at how much my profit or loss margin has varied among these items.  I'm close to done now, about two weeks behind schedule.

Dismantling the Postwar layout

I began the dismantling process in late October as I started pulling trains and accessories to sell them.  The photo above shows the layout baseboards with all the track removed. I took the photo on January 8th - quite a long way into the process. I'll add some more "before" pictures later when I can find them.

Major sorting and selling are done .  The tidied-up workbench is on the right and the trains on the wall in the distance are Rail King items I decided to keep. 

 

January 8, the dismantling process is well under way now with most of the Homasote and Styrofoam insulation gone and the bare frame exposed.  You can see the bus wires in the foreground.

These two photos are from January 15.  Two sides of the layout are now dismantled.  Center-right of the picture is the stacked lumber I will re-use.  I'm planning the infrastructure for the new layout as I go and I made a decision to reuse the leg assemblies today. Half of the Rail King boxes on the left are empty; the others contain nostalgia pieces from the first O-gauge trains we bought for Zach in 2010.

Dismantling continues - my goal is to complete it by the end of January, including removing the lights for re-siting above the new layout. It's ambitious but well on the way.

The picture above shows the storage method we use for trains to be cycled in and out of the layout or sold.  Trains are packed into cardboard trays we get from Aldi that were originally used for transporting blackberries and raspberries.  They're very sturdy and have tabs on the top edge that fit into slots in the bottom of trays placed on top of them, enabling them to be stacked securely without risk they'll fall over.  Inside the trays, individual items are separated from one another by cardboard strips or very thin Styrofoam cloth so they don't rub against each other and leave paint scratches.  The piles of trays are then stacked on dollies so they're easily moved.  They'll be stored under the new layout.

In the next post, I'll describe the process of planning the new layout..............