By way of an introduction,_
I have always had a passion for all things related to transport. For years I had a fixation with aircraft and in the 1970's joined the Air training Corps. I was able to have flights in aircraft and that really encouraged me to embark on all things relating to that genre. Time marched on and before too long, marriage and family life took over so the aircraft side of my interests took a bit of a back seat.

I also had a passion for railways. I recall the days in the late 60's where I would venture away from the family home and go further than was allowed at that time and sit for hours watching the steam and diesel trains from a bridge between Bishops Stortford and Saffron Walden. It was around this time that I always wished that Santa would bring me a train set for Christmas. That never happened although I did receive many sets of Meccano.

Fast forwarding now to the early 80's. I re-kindled my love of trains and persuaded the family that it would be a good idea for me to start building a model railway layout in the loft area. I would also at this time travel all over the UK on various train spotting escapades with a good friend. Our books were full of red lines under the numbers and we also ventured onto various depots having crawled beneath the perimeter fences. Happy days.
The layout in the loft was starting to take shape. Half inch thick chipboard fixed to the joists consisted of a full oval of two tracks with a couple of points. It was of course DC and at that time, I could only dream of owning one of those new DC chipped thingy's.
My dream was to model my local station situated at Ipswich in Suffolk.
I began to experiment. I was building my own points from copper clad sleepers (and they worked) and even building a signal box from my own moulded bricks made from poly filler.
Alas, all good things come to an end and when my then current domestic situation changed, I had to sell my collection of loco's and other train related goodies.

Now in the late 80's and a new domestic life started. I was able to rekindle my love of aircraft and very soon was building scale radio controlled aircraft, flying in displays and even flying the real thing.

Fast forward now to 2009. My good lady and I moved to Spain. Very soon I began to build a full size Boeing 737 simulator - well the inside was full size. It is currently still under construction but at this moment in time most of the knobs and switches behave as they would on the real aircraft.
Also on the flight sim computer was a train simulator which between my hours of flying, I would drive trains.
I have digressed somewhat from my original intention but that is what happens when you get to recalling your younger years.

Last year - 2016, my wife was going to bed at around 10.00pm but before toddling off remarked that I may be interested in a programme that was about start - it was all about model trains. I watched it and the seed was set yet again. I went to sleep that night dreaming of all things model trains and without any idea of what I was about to embark on.
The next day, I was straight onto Ebay and searched for everything plus more. I was looking at downloaded model railway magazines and doing all sorts of research. There was but one problem. Many searches and downloads seemed to have one common denominator - DCC. What on earth was this, I had never heard of it before. It didn't exist 30 odd years ago.

No pictures yet but bear with me.