My first layout, having returned to railway modelling, turned into a disaster. It was spiralling out of control, was too complex, fiddly, and quite frankly, no fun to work on. I ripped it all up, and decided to start again.

After much deliberation, fiddling around in XTrkCad4, and browsing magazines and things, I've finally come up with a plan.

I present - 'untitled II'.

Location: Somewhere around the Chilterns. Ish.

Era: Modern, post-privatisation.

Scene Modelled: A small TMD carrying out work on anything I feel like, along with a small commuter station.

The whole base board consists of two 700x300mm boards. The split exists to the left of the bridge in the middle. The boards are already built, and are free-standing. The idea behind building the boards before doing anything else was to stop me going mad with the design. The boards I built were of a much better construct than my first attempt, which was pretty rubbish. I found some screws didn't even make contact with the second bit of wood they were meant to be going into!

On this design, we have two tracks entering on the left. These converge onto the two lines entering the station. One ends in a bay platform, the other on a through platform. Said lines also go toward a headshunt, with a fuelling facility sitting in it. After entering the headshunt, a train and make its way down to the four roads of the TMD. There's some Pikestuff buildings I like the look of, which should fit the part.

Offscene on the left, I will have a cassette storage system, or at least a couple of bits of track on a plank which can be used to change trains. It won't be a full-scale fiddle yard, not until I have more storage room! The right hand side will lead nowhere for now. In future it could be extended, or may never go anywhere!

I'm leaning towards the notion of no side scenic breaks (i.e. bridges). I'll probably have a back-scene though. I'm probably not going to use low-relief buildings as to me, they look like a building cut in half!

The bridge in the middle will serve to hide the baseboard join. It will join up with the houses at the back, which are on an embankment, the same level as the road. On the other parts of the bridge, it will drop down to baseboard level.

The office building will be some sort of non-descript modern building type. Similarly, the bus depot down front could be an interesting feature, as I can plonk various random buses and things in the yard in front of it.

The empty green space on the bottom right may end up with something in it. So far, I'm not overly sure what!

I'm going to try and have a bash at working out where the signals should sit.

I'm much more pleased with this plan though. It's an actual plan!