I am nothing, if not scatterbrained sometimes when it comes to building models and projects, I don’t necessarily mean that in a bad way, but knowing yourself is important. Motivation and desire to work on things or do certain tasks ebbs and flows within me. Some days I really am excited to ballast track (the hell??), others, I want nothing to do with it. The same goes for building freight car kits. Some days I am totally in a groove to do fiddly underbody details and piping, other days, the thought of that has me thinking of seeing how far a 40′ boxcar will fly if i take it out side and pull back and launch it across the courtyard! Because of this, I tend to have a lot of projects on the go in various stages of completeness.
My “unbuilt” kit pile. Most of these are started and on the layout half built. It’s small compared to a lot of people’s!
I don’t need a lot of rolling stock for my layout (we’re talking in the tens of cars, not the hundreds like some large layouts), and at the moment, I have 11 kits in hand, 10 of which are in some form of having been started. I’ve also “finished” three kits to the point of being ready to weather this year, though those three are a CN Auxiliary Train with a crane and not really for operations!
CN Staging next to my workbench full of half built kits! The 3 in the back are ready to weather, the other 10 are in various stages of almost ready for paint to barely started!
So, while I hate to set goals artificially, I’m going to set one. I would like to have at least half the cars in the picture above finished, painted, decalled and clear coated by the end of December (December 2020 for those keeping score). That’s five cars. Of them, one hiding is missing just end number decals, and clear coat; one is basically done except for one piece of wire pipe; and one is just missing trucks. So really, I’m setting a goal of finishing building 2 cars, and painting/decaling 4. I think I can do that in two months, especially as I am taking a week off in November to literally just work on the layout, and some time off at Christmas where there is lots of English football to watch to forget about the fact we probably won’t be getting together with friends and family to end the year, such is 2020 though right?
Musings on my Model Railroading Addiction 
I love the “idea” of kits. But knowing myself,I know they might never see the layout 😉 I love seeing the process and progress on the bench and the layout! Happy Halloween 🎃
I believe you can do it if you give it a go! Don’t start with kits like the resin I am doing, but there are still lots of plastic kits out there that are an easier starting point to build your skills and learn techniques, and they are forgiving enough that they should operate OK even if you make mistakes on your first go’s!!
Happy Halloween to you too!
Stephen
Finishing kits? Who does that when collecting them and starting them is so much more fun? Crazy talk.
Seriously though it’s an exciting goal and way to end the year with those five kits complete. Given the proportion of your fleet they’d represent that would be quite an accomplishment and probably quite empowering – feeding energy into the next round of cars.
Lol, the goal feels like low hanging fruit considering my picking up of an order at Credit Valley yesterday moved the flatcar from “under construction” to “ready to paint”. I’m probably going to try and advance the last two that are semi-started to be weighted and be rolling models ready for all the fiddly underbody and detail installation.