Firstly, an explanation.

Since I bought the Iain Rice Book - 'Layout Design' (from the Haynes 'Realistic Railway Modelling' series) a few years ago, I've been keen on some of the ideas included - principally that of the holistic approach to design, rather than my current/previous method of blundering in with an XtrkCad plan and often making avoidable mistakes along the way (ref the Shed layout, where the curves are too tight to run things properly...)

What will follow and will develop into at least one (and at the current enthusiasm level, more than one!) layout based on a single concept - a line that never was.

One of Iain's suggestions was to write up a fictional history of your line. For the last couple of evenings I have been doing some (Fascinating!) research with the aim of doing that, and tonight present the first part. The reason I have chosen a Blog, rather than a layout thread, is that it will hopefully let me group things together in a more structured way - this won't be a conventional 'here's a plan, here's the baseboards, here's the first of the track' etc thread - instead I will no doubt meander between different aspects (the fiction, the baseboard design - which will be a new direction for me as well, the stock etc).