This is my first serious foray into both the world of railway modelling and blogging, so I apologise if I ramble. I have to say I'm rather looking forward to it.

When I was growing up I had the somewhat obligatory Hornby OO train set and a even had a moulded plastic layout I got while I was living in Germany. Since then, moving around, university and work have all kept me away. Now though, time and space has given me the opportunity to indulge in some proper modelling.

So, the first decision was which scale to use. Even though I do have some space it is still quite limited so if I wanted anything more complex than a small diaorama OO/HO was out. Having seen the very good selection of models available from Farish and Dapol it was clear that N gauge was the one to go for.

Even then, my initial hopes to build a mainline station with a couple of branches based loosely on the

Watford area had to be abandoned as far to large and complex for the space available.

That lead me to thinking about my childhood in the late 80s and the few years I lived near Doncaster, going for day trips to Cleethorpes and holidays further afield to places like Bridlington, Scarborough & Whitby. Even the odd trip to Alnwick and Bamburgh.

It seemed to fit as a suitable area to model and it have me the idea of a layout with a small terminus at a seaside town. I didn't fancy the idea of following a prototype but an amalgam of my holiday haunts would work as a basis to start from.

One of my other interests is real ale, and so it was an easy decision to include a brewery on the layout and that it could be linked to the track to add some interest and freight traffic to the regional railways class 101s, Sprinters and Pacers that inhabited such areas. Not to mention the summer relief trains running the seaside specials.

No doubt there will be a few false starts down the line and the track plan has already undergone several revisions based on the available rolling stock and my desire to try and have the train movements as realistic as possible. But that's a discussion for another time.

As I work on the layout I'll post some photos of my progress, more as a record for myself than anything else, but if it proves helpful to someone else, then so much the better.