IanLister's Tweed South Bank blog

fantastic work, watching with interest

Ian,

 

That's coming along very nicely.  Personally, I'm quite an advocate of doing different elements of the layout concurrently.  In building Modbury (my first 2FS layout and indeed the first layout for about 20 years), I pretty well completed part of the embankment at the right hand end of the layout before all of the track was laid in the sidings.  The reason being that I was keen to try out things like memory wire to operate the point (at the end of the embankment), and also to build and operate the down home signal (again memory wire operated), I also wanted to try out static grass (as that wasn't about when I was last active in the hobby).  I also think that its a bit of an incentive to progress the rest of the layout if you can see what it might eventually look like.

 

Ian 

Hi Ian and thanks. My thinking is exactly as you've described your approach to building Modbury. If the result is half as good as yours I'll be pleased with it; it's certainly very different to the 2mm FS layout I built.

Ian

Ian,

Thank you for your kind comments, Modbury is pretty different from anything in 2mmFS - I have never seen baulk road points in that scale (although I have seen some plain track).  All being well my abilities won't run out before my ambition :-)

 

I don't think you need worry about the end result of your labours, from what I can see you are producing something rather special - I love the viaduct and the ash ballast just looks so right.

Ian

Ian nowt wrong with your approach. If building a layout in situ it makes sense to do the backscene before all the baseboards are built as you cannot easily reach it if the baseboards will be deep. I saw in Model Railroader an article on building a movable staging yard. The builder was doing one of those huge basement layouts and starting at one end with trains running to and from the staging yards as each section was completed the staging yard was moved along the line to allow the next section to be built. You could easily knock up a small staging yard and build a layout a baseboard at a time all the time keeping it operational once the track was laid on the new board.

 

Don

Ian nowt wrong with your approach. If building a layout in situ it makes sense to do the backscene before all the baseboards are built as you cannot easily reach it if the baseboards will be deep. I saw in Model Railroader an article on building a movable staging yard. The builder was doing one of those huge basement layouts and starting at one end with trains running to and from the staging yards as each section was completed the staging yard was moved along the line to allow the next section to be built. You could easily knock up a small staging yard and build a layout a baseboard at a time all the time keeping it operational once the track was laid on the new board.

 

Don

An interesting idea Don. What I plan is to build the track to the storage yard once I've done the bit I'm working on, as it will get a fair bit of track down quickly and allow me to run things while I develop the rest.