Replanning

I've been thinking about a potential remake for The Garden Railway for some time now, but only recently have I found the time to sit down and make a serious attempt at looking into it.

"But why rebuild it?" I can hear some readers asking.

The clearances when shunting are too tight, the head shunt is also a bit too short, the engine shed door frame is too low for a good amount of the current loco fleet, the wiring connections aren't great (Despite soldering on more pickups last year) In summary: all this results from this layout initially being built in 2020 with what was to hand, including the lack of rolling stock for clearance checks. For the last two and a half years it's probably spent more time as a glorified photo plank, and even that's difficult given the full height of the garden wall at the front. At the time though, it was a very fun sanity saving build.

It's not all doom and gloom though. The majority of the buildings can be salvaged and reused on a MK2 version, in fact the only one that is destined for the bin is the house and garden walls. Being a Scalescenes card/paper kit the printing had started to fade probably due to a lack of varnish in certain areas. The nice aspect of this is that I can have a go at bashing one of the Peco laser cut terrace house backs. I've been wanting to try one of their laser cut kits for a while, but had no context to do so!

The track plan is still going to be the same: The classic inglenook. Looking for a different way to present it I stumbled upon an article by Paul Lunn in the December 2008 edition of Railway Modeller, showing how a 3x1 inglenook could be built in a bookcase using Peco Setrack, with a more curved approach to the track plan. Trying this out in a space 6x18" resulted in the above photo. So far it seems to be looking quite nice. The main thing now is to play around with potential building sizes/placement. From there it'll be a case of looking through the off-cut pile for suitable baseboard materials.

Watch this space...