I’m fortunate (or not) enough to be involved with two new layouts. Farnham and District Model Railway club’s N gauge group are busy planning for a new layout, as Basingstoke is showing it’s age, and my garage has been cleared of junk and is available as a railway room.

The club layout will be a prototype, and after new members were consulted it was not going to necessarily be a Southern prototype, as the new members all have interests which lay elsewhere. The predominantly Southern loving existing members had whittled a short list of over one hundred candidates down to twelve (which became known as the dirty dozen), all Southern. We of northern, midland a west country origin argued that another part of the country should be considered, and so we were asked to submit proposals before Christmas 2010.

I hail from the North East so love all things Gresley, but also have a hankering for Stanier locomotives. In my ideal world I wanted an excuse to run both. With that in mind I researched a couple of lines, the ex L&Y Calderdale route and the Waverley line. In the mid 1950s to 1960s timeline one could see a wealth of ex LNER and LMS locos running on both lines. After much research I proposed, in early December, two candidate stations, Brighouse in the Calder and St Boswells on the Waverley.

After several rounds of voting neither was chosen, St Boswells being piped at the post by one vote. (I’m duty sworn not to reveal the winner, all in good time !)

My research for St Boswells had involved the thread here heavily, and the consumption of several books on the Waverly and Borders branches. I’d fallen for the Waverley line, and decided that my own modelling would be based there.

Having returned to railway modelling fifteen months ago, after a twenty year break, I’ve spent a lot of time planning, so that I have a stable wish-list for my railway:

• A rural, three dimensional layout. - I dislike flat ‘on the baseboard top’ layouts, the railway must cut through the landscape.
• ‘Mainline’ running – A roundy-roundy allowing the running of eight to ten coach trains hauled by express locomotives, and prototypical length goods trains, without the front end catching the back.
• Sidings and a branch – So that I can drive trains and shunt.
• A small MPD – cause I like steam sheds!
• DCC control – I’m a software engineer, it will involve a computer, I will be able to drive it manually too.

This may sound like a lot for a typically sized layout, but the aforementioned garage allows for an eighteen by seven foot model. Given one of the seven foot long sides will contain the fiddle yard, this gives me about forty foot of running for the mainline (a scale mile as near as dammit), plenty of room to run long trains without looking silly. Although these generous dimensions sound perfect I found I could not fit St Boswells in without some foreshortening and bending, the MPD was a wee bit small for my liking and the Kelso branch starts some mile and a half south of the station. After kicking around with track plans for Hawick and Galashiels I couldn’t come up with a plan which gave me enough landscape around the railway, nor exactly the facilities I wanted. Like dozens before me I copped out, and decided to model a ‘might have been’ on my line of choice, and so was born Cruikglen.

Exactly 37 track-plans later I’ve arrived at a layout that will give me all the operational flexibility I need, the type of scenery I want and a final plan which I haven’t felt the need to ‘tweak’ for two months now. Cruikglen v38 is what I’m going to build, and this blog will document it’s construction. I don’t plan to publish the track plan all in one go, but will reveal it in stages as the layout is constructed. I’ll explain my thinking behind the design, the actual construction, my successes and failures as a record for myself, and also something informative for you, dear readers.

Onwards and upwards……