Clearing a bit of space in the attic room that my good lady kindly permits me to use as an office/den/model railway and aeroplane room/music studio, still left only enough room for a layout no more than 4ft / 1200mm square. It has to be more or less central in the room, as the sloping roof would make running it round a wall difficult, even if there was enough clear space; there are a number of storage boxes also crammed in for general "stuff". I should point out, as we both have constructive hobbies, we converted our old kitchen into a joint workshop, me for planes and railways, she for jewellery making, after putting in a kitchen diner in half of our ground floor in the summer of 2015. Worktops at a good height, power light and water, a few fixed power tools e.g. Dremel and drill press stand, lots of storage space in the old cupboards (now pretty well full up of course) - all very handy, and the distance between workshop and layout / hangar two floor up gives one useful additional exercise!
After sifting through free designs for small layouts on the net, I came up with the one you see here. I wanted a roundy-round layout to give trains a bit of a run, but with the front half nearest the camera scenic, and basic fiddle facility behind the scenes. This was started last autumn, two 4x2 baseboards being made as it may all need to be taken apart on occasion, should all far-flung offspring all return from various parts of the globe for a visit at once any time in the near future. The baseboards are typical ladder framed ply top jobs, carried on two modestly priced trestles, the only slight problem being that the floor is as level as all that; when the house had the attic converted to a third bedroom years ago, it had already been off-kilter for best part of a hundred years no doubt - it used to be a shop in the old days, next to another, which by coincidence was once a model shop!
Anyway, after purchasing various secondhand bits of stock to get started on a bit of "playing trains", most of which has now been disposed of again to offest some of the cost of the project, I eventually decided that, being a Southern Man, having grown up in old South Eastern territory, a BR Southern region layout it should be. The nearby town of Rye, with it's station sited at the bottom of the hill the town stands on, was a bit of an inspiration, so Tillingham will have it's bit of townscape located at a higher level, to offset what will otherwise be a bog-standard flat railway layout, with low relief buildings in slightly under 4mm scale for a bit of perspective. I also tried to make it look just a bit less train set-ish, and gain some useful track length, by making the basic oval lay diagonally on the boards. The period will be late 1950s/early 60s, so I can use a bit of steam traction that I recall from childhood - H Class motor train (on advance order) with maybe a C class for freight, and their brief replacement a BR standard 2-6-2 or 2-6-4 tank, and for the later part of the period the Bachmann/Kernow Class 205 DMU. I treated myself to that long before any real scenic work was done, as the green set with small yellow panel they sell just happens to be one which in real life actually ran from my now home town of Hastings to and fro on the Marshlink line to Ashford - I probably travelled on it at some point! Had to have it, even if it busted the budget....... So these pictures are very early days, since then a scratch-built balsa based platform has been added, which is in all truth barely adequate for the two-car DMU, and only for use by the little 4mm scale passengers who have long-jump capabilities, but it does just fit. There will be the two-road goods yard with a coal merchants and the Superquick kit goods shed, maybe a bit of river in the front right hand corner, trains entering from the main line junction the other side of the hill through a tunnel, and exiting under a road bridge to the right. So far so good, one more post and I'll be up to date....

As you can see, the 205 DEMU only just fits in my platform - mind the gap everyone!