Anyone else run trains for years before touching scenery?

Bare plywood here for going on nine years now, and I've made peace with it. My HO layout lives in the garage and about a third of it got scenery back in 2019, a small town scene with a scratchy backdrop I painted with cheap craft acrylics. The rest is roadbed, ballast on the mainline, and plywood around the rest. I run trains every Sunday morning with coffee in hand and it never once felt unfinished to me.

What finally got me building again was lowering the bar way down. Instead of the big plaster-and-paint push I kept postponing, I started with a single foam creek bed and a bag of ground foam. One evening, no pressure. That little win sat there looking good and pulled me into the next bit. The intimidating stuff shrank once I stopped treating scenery like one giant project. I also think running trains during construction actualy helps the layout. You find the dead spots, the bad grades, the siding that's too tight for your longer cars. If you scenery everything first, you might be burying problems under foam and paint. My buddy who built his layout museum-style before running found two unreachable turnouts he had to rip out. So no, mine will probably never be done, and I've stopped pretending otherwise. It's a railroad, not a diorama. Grain trains on bare plywood sound like a perfectly good hobby to me.

I went the other direction years back and it changed the hobby for me. I spent four years running trains on bare benchwork with a Bachmann Spectrum consolidation, and I told myself the same thing you are, that running was the fun part and scenery could wait. What I found was the running slowly got hollow because there was nothing for the trains to be going anywhere. No towns, no reason for that grain to exist. When I finally forced myself to build one corner, just a 2 foot by 3 foot farm scene with a Woodland Scenics barn and some static grass, the trains suddenly meant something and I ran more, not less.

The trick that worked for me was shrinking the task until it was stupid. Not 'do the hills this month' but 'mix one batch of plaster cloth and put it on this one corner on Tuesday night.' Thirty minutes, done, walk away. The intimidation was in the size of the project, not the work itself. I'd also say the shoebox of structures is a clue. Those kits sitting unbuilt are probaly part of why the running feels complete alredy. Build one on a weeknight. A small building kit is way less scary than scenery, and it gets you touching the layout without a paint brush in hand.

As for finishing, mine's about 80 percent done after twelve years and I've stopped caring about the last 20.

The shoebox of structures is the detail that jumped out at me, because I did somthing similar with a kit stash that accumulated for about four years before I touched any of it. What finally worked was a rule I imposed on myself: no operating session starts until I have glued one subassembly, even something as trivial as a wall section or a chimney, and honestly that constraint has produced more completed buildings than any dedicated 'work weekend' ever did. I suspect the real bottleneck for you is not plaster or paint but the transition between the two modes, since running trains requires zero setup decisions whereas scenicking requires you to choose where a hill goes, and choosing is the part we all procrastinate on.

The bit about shrinking the project into one small win is exactly how it worked for me. I kept a bare corner of my layout bare for almost two years beacuse I saw it as a whole mountain to build, then one weeknight I just stuck a single foam hill profile in place and left it there. Seeing it sit next to the track made me want to add a second one a few days later, and that corner got scenicked within a month. Now I do the same thing with anything that feels big, one small piece at a time, even if it looks silly next to the finished stuff.

The only thing that's ever gotten me moving is a deadline. Had a couple of guys from the local club coming over for an ops session last fall, and suddenly I cared about how the room looked. Knocked out a backdrop and some static grass in three weekends flat after years of nothing. Problem is, the second they left, all momentum died again. It's been six months and I haven't touched a brush since. So I'm wondering, does anyone else need an audience to get anything done, or is that just me being weird about it?