About a dozen years ago I attended a meeting of the NE area group of the 2mm Association where someone had on display a tiny shunting layout built onto an IKEA two drawer unit. Whist lt was too small for my liking, I noticed it was bult on top of a 2-drawer IKEA unit, about 80 cms by 28 cms, and which seemed to be built of a high grade 7-ply birch plywood, and sounded cheap. It occurred to me that three locked in a line would make a baseboard area of 2.4 metres by 28 cms, big enough for a prqactrice build shelf layout and with the added advantage of six integral drawers for storing 'gloatbox' items.

"Lets go to IKEA Dearest" said I. "You haven't been taking your medicine again", Dearest replied. But we went anyway and for a couple of years they sat there as a six drawer unit holding goodies and collecting dust. Then I finally got round to making track. Apart from a couple of test builds, this was my first attempt at 2mm finescale track building.

Templot, over a few evenings, generated me a nice trackplan with lots of siding space in several areas, a platform with a main face and bay at the back, loco shed road and goods shed road, all fed from a cassette long enough for a five coach train with loco. So I built it, 13 turnouts (only one of which can be called a straight one) operated by wire in tube from slide switches set into the board edge which also changed vee polarity, wired for two controllers and with 10 uncoupling magnets liberally situated around to operate the DG couplings. Track was code 40 bullhead nickel-silver from a couple of ten metre coils, soldered directly to PCB sleepering from 2mm Shop 1. Having got it wired up and working, it was used for a while for theraputic shunting, then reverted to being a shelf layout, literally, with stuff piled on it. It never to be ballasted or sceniced.

Why? I guess the standard of track-making, whilst acceptable and operationally ok, was not really good enough ( in my defence it was a first attempt) and coming along in the near future was both the Versaline and then Easitrac systems. I decided recently that rather than bin it that I would re-build it using Versaline turnouts and easitrac plain track. Also from shunting experience, I realised that the entry to the goods shed was from the wrong direction making that aspect of shunting difficult, so I took the opportunity to resite that and also reduce by one turnout as a kickback headshunt for it was no longer required. Below, assuming I can get the system to work, is a photo of the centre of the three boards as was, this was sprayed in undercoat/primer at one time as I was using it as a demo piece at a Wells show.

Original middle board, showing the wire in tube switching. Don't look too closely!

Anyway, track construction has started, with versaline chairplates being soldered onto pcb sleepering, still waiting to be gapped though. The actual construction will be in-situ as normal, once I have refaced the baseboards with new ply on top of the previous. But wire-in-tube has been discarded, more about that later. The bit of easitrac plain track is there simply because it is..... A side benefit I can enjoy is not having to wait for shop orders from shop 1, it's upstairs!

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At the bottom of the last the new trackplan is visible, printed all ono one sheet to paper. You can just make out the board joint positioning. Cassette feeds into the bottom left, station at top right. But enough for now. Those still awake may take a nap.