Though not a picture a taken at the genesis of my layout which has the working title of Halstead Sidings, this picture has nothing to do with the actual building of my layout but is in fact one of the earliest pictures I have, as I didn't think about writing a blog Halstead Sidings had an unnamed predecessor which was a a fairly big double track loop which was roughly 8ft by 10ft, had a decent sized goods yard and a roundhouse loco shed. This was all on analougue using a Hornby HM2000 plus the two add on controllers and all the turnouts were operated by Peco point motors controlled by an electronic pencil. the track was a mixtue of Peco and Hornby settrack with the use of some Peco flexitrack.

This was fairly reliable but the wiring was a mess (I have never pretended to be a tidy person) and when things did go wrong it took a while to find the source of the problem. Eventually it proved it was too big for what I could handle at the time, my youthfulness allowed me to bite off more than I could chew, so my 21 year old brain got to planning and came up with a branchline terminus with would be based somewhere on the LNER between 1930 and 1947, which would give me quite a scope with what I could run as I tend to buy a lot of LNER liveried locos as there is something I can't resist about the LNER (though I do have some locos from BR and other companies, these get run on the club layout)

This is what I came up with:

It would give me lot of operating potential, as there plenty of movements I can make, as there is a runaround loop in the platform from which you can access the shed, to enable a change of loco, coaling and watering etc. There is also the goods yard with three decent sized (for a small layout) sidings one of which ends in a goods shed.

I decided at this point that I would go DCC, and in an attempt to actually make it look like a model more than a cross breed between model and trainset I elected to go for Peco code 75 track and electrofrog points which have been quite reliable in service, that was until I ballasted them, but a bit of fiddling and cleaning and they all work faultlessly again.

The fiddle yard could do with being a bit longer as a simple three coach train plus loco has to be taken off if I wish to use the other two tracks. As on the plan I used a Peco 3-way turnout which proved unreliable so I ripped it out and used 2 normal Peco small radius turnouts which are much better.

As mentioned before I decided to go DCC and after looking at various systems, finally decided on a Bachmann Dynamis thankfully I haven't any problems with it so far (touch wood). I thought about operating the points with analouge again mostly due to the cost of all the decoders for the points but I really like the idea of running everything form just one console so I an currently experimenting with different point motors to see what I find most suitable (which reminds me once I get the layout out of storage I must get round to trying that ZTC point motor with built in decoder they do seem a wonderful idea!).

So for now that is the ramblings about my layout over with. I must say it really does look quite different now as I mention it was started four years ago, though for most of the last year it has been in storage due to housing difficulties but it should be up and running again within a couple of months!

Until next time where I might talk about some of the stock!