>>1064400I think I've been pretty frugal so far, but it's an expensive hobby...
Let's see here...
I've probably spent about...
$50 on paints + brushes
$250 on basswood
$200 on scenery details
$150 on 3D Printed stuff
$125 on Tomix chassis'
$50 on stuff it turns out I can't actually use
$25 for a transformer
$200 worth of trains this month
$265 worth of engines and rolling stock prior to that... I've been working on this one for a while, so really I was pretty good about not spending much on actual engines and cars right up until this month
~$20 worth of glue
~$50 worth of tools just to get started
~$25 on engine maintenance stuff
$100 on building facing stuff
$30 for windows
About $200 for track
So... So far I'd estimate that I've spent somewhere between $1740 and $2000 on this, since I probably forgot something somewhere along the line. I've been pretty frugal up until this month by just trying to focus on scenery and only buying trains when I find a deal that's too good to pass up. So before this month my fleet consisted of... 1 car that I scratch-built, 1 boxcar, 1 caboose, 1 Dash-9, 1 steam engine, 3 Jackson Sharp Excursion cars, and 5 3D-printed shells on Tomix chassis. So I had 6 cars, 3 engines, and 5 powered commuter rail cars; 14 total.
This month I've bought 3 tank cars, 6 box cars, and 2 engines, so I've almost doubled the size of my fleet this month. It's expensive.
At this point I have about 4 and a half square feet of layout I'm actively working on, and of that, a section about about 0.5 feet by 2 feet is more or less complete, and the rest is about a quarter of the way done maybe? You could use those figures to say that layouts cost about $1000 per square foot, but it's probably not quite that bad because this particular layout is... Probably much more expensive per square foot than normal layouts, and because I've bought more trains than I'm actually able to use at the moment.
