Hi

I had previously started this elsewhere on the web but I'd been convinced to sign up to RMweb, which promptly stopped working and moved here!

Anyway, hopefully being fresh to it all will stand me in good stead, so, on with the bloggy-ma-doodah thingummy bit.

The Chocolate Box is a joint project between myself and my friend (who is a member here, and who will hopefully scribble a few lines at some point :-D).

Now I must point out , I'm pretty new to modelling, my friend is something of an old hand although not in this particular scale.

We both were interested in seeing what we could do with T-Gauge and thought it was time to give it a go. We'd seen quite a few layouts on the web and thought we would like to see what was possible for us in a small space.

Ordering in a 120R starter set and the Sky-blue(Hanwa line)Type 103 four-car train sets was the first step.

That small space presented itself to us in the form of a wooden chocolate box we picked up at a car-boot sale!

With the enclosure decided upon we set to scratching our heads over potential layouts drawn up in auto cad and numerous bits of cut out track that would fit the box. We wanted to see what we could achieve with off the shelf track sections and eventually ended up at this point:

This plan allowed us to take the layout a little more 3D as we had a bit of height to play with so we could hopefully make it a little bit more interesting.

After calculating and ordering the necessary additional track etc we began.

We decided rather than to build directly into the box, to use an mdf base board so that we could remove the whole thing from the box intact to work on. We had already worked out using cut outs roughly where we needed to fashion the levels so set to work using some sheet styrene to build up the basic structure of the landscape.

..and the layout a little further along in the box ( it's actually in the wrong way around in this photo, my bad! )

The tabs you can see are just temporary straps made from masking tape so we can remove it from the box, as it was a bit of a tight fit and needed some tweaking! That's been sorted out now thankfully..

It's obviously still very early days but it is up and running (yay!), and we have plenty more work ahead of us. I need to get on with the landscaping and we have a couple more bridges to produce and put in place; and also some work in on the box itself as we need access to the back corner where the track is under cover in case of derailments etc, without having to lift the whole thing out; the lid needs stays, and we need to figure out a good way to incorporate the controller . I think we will be trying to find out a little more about pwm control somewhere along the line.

Now a lot of the T-gauge layout's I've seen online have been a bit, well, 'hmmmmm' .. Given the scale it is probably unrealistic to expect to pull off ultra-fine detail, but our aim is to make it 'believable' if that is possible. It isn't based on anything and will be a purely fictitious layout, but all the same, it will be interesting to see what we can acheive here.