Over the years I’ve been in to and out of railway models, originally it started back when I was a kid. I had built a reasonable sized layout and done some scenic elements, it had a large bridge at the back of the layout where the line crossed over itself, then a small bridge where it crossed back again, then turned and came back round to the front which was a sort of mix between a station and a maintenance yard. There was a nice grassy hill on the left side with the track going into a tunnel – hand made with bits of card and some sheet grass over the top. The sheet grass was also used for the centre area as well. The track was ballasted through the scenery and the front area used sheet ballast paper. There was a road and a level crossing, and the grass in this area was done using those little bags of grass scatter. The inclines for the raised track used basic Hornby raised track supports, that’s the basic ones with no decoration and not the nicer inclined piers which I found out about later. It was not as good as what you will see people making today, but considering how long ago it was and my own age at the time, it was certainly respectable. For various reasons it needed to be removed many years ago, and sadly no picture was taken of its final state, which means I’m unable to show anything here. While at uni I got back into it a little, and had some track running around on the floor of my flat, I did acquire some more locos during this time but never built a layout there.

Recently I got interested in some YouTube channels of people building their layouts and it got me interested in the hobby again. Therefore I decided to try building a new layout, the problem is the space, ideally I want a nice large area to build a proper sized layout, but for now I’m going to settle on a small piece of flat pine I found at a local B&Q. Due to the size, its going to be a very tight radius ’roundy-roundy’ – in other words its a circle with about 1 straight in it. I am trying to make it a little more interesting, and this will probably be the pain, as I’m trying to make it have an incline and a bridge. Its a circle with 2 points sending 2 lines inside and out under the bridge. The challenge is that the track needs to be high enough for the trains to pass under, but low enough at the points for the line to split off to go under it. This means the points will be at half the height, so the line comes down from the bridge to the point, and the line then runs down from the point under the bridge. The main line continues round to the next point and then back up to the bridge again. I then want to add in some scenery to test out the new materials from Woodland Scienics. The purpose of this layout is just to test out the new materials – Woodland Scienics make some interesting products in their Subterain range which makes inclines and other layout areas really easy, or so it appears. This layout will be built to try out some of those things before I attempt a proper layout.

Check out their video below, its a nice intro into the products

I have decided to try to track (pun) my efforts in layout building using a YouTube channel you can find here. At the moment my documenting efforts are a little behind real time, I have already started the small test layout and I will be adding more posts and some videos over the next few days to catch-up. The YouTube channel currently just has some old random clips of real trains in the wild just to start things off. Later I will add some videos of the test layout.