A few of you may remember I previously had a few blog entries featuring some CAD plans and baseboards for my attempt to model Rannoch in 2mm Finescale. That was almost two years ago and pretty much no progress has been made on the layout front. I have been slowly collecting and converting/detailing rolling stock in preparation for track laying which never happened. Most rolling stock items which I started to detail and convert haven't been finished yet so there isn't much to report on that front either. This slow progress has mostly been caused by a new job I started just under a year ago.

Since building the baseboards to fit into the available space I had, something was nagging at the back of my mind about how I had to compromise parts of the layout. Over the past year I returned to the drawing board on numerous occasions to try and attempt to create more space on the scenic section. In the end I ended up scrapping the baseboards I had and decided to completely start again.

This is how far I have progressed in the last few days of planning.

I now have access to a large industrial unit thanks to a friend starting a new business. This means I am no longer limited in size but don't want anything too big for obvious reasons. The size I have decided on is just shy of 20x5ft.

I started with a screenshot from Google Earth which I then roughly scaled and used as a background shape in Templot. After getting the scenic track work to a stage I was happy with my attention turned to the fiddle yard. As can be seen from the above screenshot, I have had to use curved turnouts to maximise the road lengths in the fiddle yard. The result is a scenic section which is roughly to scale in length and a fiddle yard which can easily cope with the trains I plan on running and still cope with any future additions to my rolling stock box.

The biggest mistake I made with the original baseboards was everything was flat. I somehow thought I could build up the scenery but there is technically three different height levels required to model this West Highland landscape. I have a design in mind for the design and construction of the scenic sections which I will create a blog entry for once I have some images to show.

Thanks

Martin