As most model railroaders say, "It all started..." I grew up in St. Louis and St. Charles Missouri; both rather large metropolitan cities. I started with the usual Marx, Lionel trains and progressed (?) to HO scale until lack of space made it necessary for me to search for an alternate plan for my "Dream Empire", which was still in the "buy-and-store-in-boxes stage, mostly rolling stock. "N" Scale looked like the only hope, even with the limited variety in the mid-1970's.

But I said if they would make an N scale 4-4-0 American Jupiter type engine like Rivarossi and Tyco had in HO scale, I'd make the "big trade". Well, thanks to Bachmann, I did it in 1975. I then got married in 1976 and moved to my father's and grandfather's hometown of Belle, MO, pop. 1200. My grandfather was well established in the furniture, appliance, sporting goods and L.P. gas business. I worked for him the next few years as I began my family (now two boys).

I kept my train hobby on simmer and on the back burner a few years. The mighty Rock Island rolled through town daily. I even had to climb on those jumbo L.P. gas tank cars at 2:00 a.m. in below zero snow and ice and slide to the dome in the dark to hook up the hoses from Grandpa's storage tank. The tank car had to be empty and ready to move in the morning to prevent penalty charges from the railroad.

Well now that I've made a short story long (ha!). ...I have now lived in Eldon, MO, some thirteen years. I have been warming up my train hobby the last few years and have been trying to keep up with new developments. I decided to make a simple (?) NTRAK module. It is just a minimum 2'X4' for now. This way I can run my N scale Empire every now and then at a train show with other NTRAK model rail roaders. Since I was most familiar with Rock Island, that is my main line road. Since Grandpa kind of had a "piece of the rock" in Belle, MO, and there was a Wye there to turn engines around, this became the theme of my module.

After building the base, I attached the track work directly to the 1/2" plywood top. For the wiring, I used a resistance soldering system on the more than 50 solder connections. This prevented melting ties and the 10 switches. I then test-ran everything and checked over the NTRAK manual several times. Then one year later, in April 1994, the Springfield, MO "Ozark N-Trak" Club let me try my new module (without scenery) at their show. It "worked great". Now the scenery had to be done before displaying it with the St. Louis N-trakers at the Greenberg Train Show on Nov. 5-6, 1994 at St. Charles, MO.

By the way, don't let anyone tell you it is an inexpensive or easy thing to build an NTRAK module. This one is about half scratch built plus scavenged material and still passed the $500 mark long ago, (no rolling stock included). And it took countless (sometimes tedious) hours to complete. You have to love it to appreciate it. But don't let anything scare you so much that you will not even try it. If you don't try it, you will never know how rewarding it can be- even if it doesn't turn out like some you see in magazines. It took me years to get up the nerve to do this article, not to mention my module.

I hope to do the east side of Belle and maybe the 1,000 foot long wooden Gasconade River trestle some day. But for now I'm detailing this module with fences, signs, wires, lights, people, vehicles such as Micro Machines, etc. I am going to have a thunder storm on the module complete with lightening, sound, and rain plus clouds! There are 24 structures on this module, but it doesn't look toy like!

Look for me at shows in the general Missouri area.