West Forge Layout: Magnitude Simon Earthquake Rocks the Town!!

So it's been a few months since I wrote anything about my layout project at home. For good reason, my father was hospitalized for two months after the new year and then we started March with his funeral. Not a fun time.

One of my earliest memories of my dad is a shopping trip of all things. It's not too surprising that I would remember this as it was a rarity, my dad didn't like to shop unless it was at his own pace at a fleamarket. Anyway, this trip was to a home improvement store called Busy Beaver if I recall, although the details in my head are sketchy and it might have been a Hills or Gold Circle or something like that. The important thing is that it was the day my dad picked out a train around our family Christmas tree. I think I was about 3 or 4 years old at the time. I remember how excited he was about that train set. Just last year I had asked him about it, and he told me he was actually really excited as he had always wanted a train when he was a kid, but his family could never afford one. That train over the years apparently meant a lot to both of us.

Onward to 2009, and my youngest son Simon seems to have the train bug right now too. He spent a lot of time with me just watching my GG1 go around and around this year. So sometime in March I pulled out the West Forge model I've been working on and got some trains running on it. I pulled out some structures and rolling stock and had a great time with a table top module. The kids really enjoyed it too. Unfortunately I decided not to stick it way back in the closet where I had been keeping it I set it upright along the wall of my bedroom with full plans to pull it out in a few days and start figuring where I wanted to place my structures on it. In comes my son who manages to somehow fall off my bed and breaks his fall with my foam layout. The damage is probably fixable but it's cracked clean through 98% of the module. If it weren't for some ducktape and ballast I think it would have been sheared clean into two pieces.

So now I'm left decided do I try and repair this to make it functional (my goal was to be able to provide 20 to 30 minutes of operating fun on the module), or do I scrap it and start moving on and renovate my basement to give me a nice train room.

Obviously the latter option would be much more fun :-D