Recently, I've been getting hammer about building something for the local arts fair in November, seeing as I'd been entered; however, my 'saving grace' was the fact that my board was a foot over the allotted size, and the other thing is, my idea was not locally representative...

Last week, I'd got an 'urgent' to do in Barcelona, so my idea was in and out and then go over to the sheds in Martorell for an hour, and then have a wander across Montserrat to the rack railway museum, just to get some ideas for a long term probable, which I though would need all the stock scratch-building for.

However, in my jaunts, I popped in to the model shop off Plaça Catalunya, to see if they'd got any 'modern-ish' freight haulers in, with the intention of ordering a 60/66 if not, just to have some heavy drag capability on the UK outline I'm slowly working through. And nearly walked out with a Kato EMD66 series.

But with the moment of paying for the locomotive, I cast my eyes to the display case for the secondhand gubbins and then everything changed.

In the case there was a pair of Fleischmann 0-6-0 overhead collection electric locos, and one had already been modified to represent the locomotives that run the engineering trains on the Vall de Nuria and Monsterrat rack railways (sure, it's not 100% accurate, and still needs things like the cab roof overhangs, warning bells removing, and the chassis/drive wheels painting the right colours), but it was 'there'. I mentioned this to the chap that was serving me in the shop, and he smiled and started bringing out some photos of his things, and also some of the prototype photos that were in the shop.

My main excuse of not knocking anything local up was quickly disappearing, as I was justifying it to all that there wasn't any RTR models, however I was about to be proved wrong with a Fleischmann starter set, a photo which I actually took (and had on my iPod) and the photos of that were being shown to me.

It turned out that all the locomotives that ran on the metre/standard gauge lines of Catalonia (as opposed to the 5' 6" Iberian lines) were mainly of Germanic/Swiss/Austrian construction or family lines, and... With a few hours in the 'workshop', a respray and renumbering, there are a lot of them in the Fleischmann catalogue; and the most 'common' one to run on the local rails is a very close build of the budget starter set locomotive, but with the lack of cabside windows, warning bells, air tanks on the roof of the cab and a different paint job. Then the rest are all represented in the Fleischmann and Arnold ranges, with just a bit of workshop time needed.

In turn, from what started out as a jaunt for a freight machine, ended up with me saying to myself "ahh, nuts to it" and opening up on two fronts at once to build a small layout representative of the local area.

In the research for some local materials, I've found some really interesting prototypical operations in the region (the tracks were up the main road for the most part, stations when scaled to N-gauge are no bigger than two ciggy packets footprint including goods shed, mixed passenger/freight, very strange coal loading stations, and a petrol mine...), and also with looking for some historical background, that has brought up some interesting things as well... The one that got me most excited is that there is a shed I walk past most weeks, a nondescript engineering unit of the type that can be found on most industrial estates up and down Europe, and... Inside are a stored Garratt 2-6-0+0-6-2, a local tank locomotive, some other bits of stock, and the thing is, very, very few people know what this shed contains (so much so, to ask if you can go have a look, you've got to write to the FGC 'assets' manager in Barcelona to arrange a visit).

So now where does it leave me? Buy more UK outline hardware, or start building a local based layout?

And the answer, I'm off in to town now to buy another board, some blue insulation foam and another jar of Nescafe, as whilst there's the mess of layout building in the workshop, it kind of makes sense to dig in and build something else at the same time... Kind of.