Spurred on by Flood I thought I’d start a blog on the progress of my layout – a model of Penzance based in the mid 70s. As I didn’t intend to start modelling again my approach has been ramshackle and in hindsight I can see the benefit of good planning beforehand! But I’ve been too impatient to get things running.

I am newly returned to the hobby. I had a layout in the mid 80s but packed everything away when I was 18. Almost exact two years ago my parents insisted on me removing the boxes of train stuff from their loft and I thought I would sell it on ebay, but instead I purchased some rolling stock. I think just to scratch an itch I had never fully satisfied. My teenage days were characterised by relative poverty and the most I managed was about four second hand coaches and two or three locos that were repainted and detailed so many times very little of the original remained. So I put together a rake of nine coaches and laid a track along the carpet and just sat there running it up and down. I was instantly hooked.

Why Penzance? Again I’m not really sure but it has got something to do with the romance of the West, days spent on the Sea wall at Dawlish or by the Cornish mainline whilst the family were on the beach. I haven’t got space for a run around layout and so a terminus seemed the obvious answer.

Quite a limiting factor for me is time. With a young family and work commitments I only get a few hours a week and that means generally, rather than focusing on the scenic elements I end up running trains or constructing rolling stock so at present scenery has taken a back seat as you’ll see.

Initially I threw some track down on an L shaped board about 4m x 4m and which I used to set up on trestles in the garage. The track plan was simple, three platforms based on the current Penzance track plan leading round the corner to a couple of fiddle sidings, with a crossover at the station throat. As time went on I expanded it to include the fourth platform and that gave some pleasant running. My biggest regret is that I initially splashed out on a lot of concrete sleeper track (Peco code 100) which on reflection is wholly inappropriate for the station area but I am too tight to replace it again with wooden. My hope now is that ballasting will hide it. In any case if I’d done more planning I would have probably opted for code 75 and if I replace it that’s what I will do. One decision I am glad I made was to use the largest radius point as my pet hate is sharp corners (so that the ends of the coaches elbow out) and I was determined to avoid that. Anyway I had a working layout, the control point set in the middle of the L so that I can reach all the points as they are not yet motorised, and I set up auto un-couplers and isolated sections at the platform ends so that I can uncouple the locomotives and move the coaches out without leaving the centre position. The other decision I made is that I wanted to run scale length trains and initially could accommodate 9 coaches. A couple of photos of that initial simple layout are here. More on the development of the layout to its current state in due course.