Although there are going to be some VERY exciting posts about rolling stock soon, in terms of the layout it has gone a bit quiet for me recently. The reality is that I have become increasingly fed up with my layout taking over half my hobby room which leaves me very little space to actually do anything. This means that I have had to compromise my work areas when building stock and it also means I tend to leave things on the layout for storage because there are simply no other storage solutions.

Still I have enjoyed this layout a lot and I have taken away a lot of very very positive lessons. Therefore at some point before Christmas Neuvic Entier will be heading to the layout in the sky. I intend to sell off as much of the track as possible and salvage all of the trees, buildings and details for use in my next project.

Or should I say projects because I am going modular. As soon as Neuvic Entier has disappeared I will be obtaining a surface for my Ikea Trestles and manufacturing several T Trak Modules. I have been admiring the work of other modular modellers for some time (Sir Madog, Mike Trice to name a few of the recent inspirations on this forum) and the method of being able to do a little at a time and get a very good looking result got my attention quite quickly. The other thing that grabbed my attention was that it was Kato Unitrack which meant that the reliability is superb and wiring very simple.

So today I had a go at learning a new skill that I have been meaning to try for some time. Layout Planning Software. WHY HAVE I NOT TRIED THIS BEFORE???? Was the question I kept asking myself as I used the software. I had a go at designing the station module for the layout. This is based on Eymoutiers (although compromises have had to be made).

The real station can be seen here.

My interpretation of it using Unitrak is like this:

I have had to leave off the maintenance sidings on the south side of the main running lines and the double slip linking the maintenance shed to the sidings is just a crossover. However there will be enough scope to give some decent operations including steam specials etc.

So if you have got this far then thanks for reading.