Trains

Ever since I was a little kid, I've always wanted a really cool train set. While I was a teenager, my father tried to help this desire and bought all sorts of electric train stuff. We created a complete layout on a large piece of plywood, had Amtrak-style trains and made an oval on the plywood It didn't last - especially when my younger brother wanted to play.... and ever since, I've wanted to recreate that set.

About that same time, my father told me about a restaurant in Chicago that had a large-scale train running from the kitchen onto the front counter. The train had mostly flat-bed cars with a cut-out to fit the plates. When someone would sit at the counter and order their food, it was delivered via train.

So once I had my own house it was time to make my train dreams a reality. Thus began a two-year thought process.

First I needed to figure out where I wanted to put the train. As you could see from the pictures of the house, there's really no open space for a train set and layout. Thus I decided to put up some sort of shelving around the top of my kitchen walls.... about 6 inches off the ceiling. And I pretty quickly decided that glass shelves would be best.