well hello there, my names Matt, a 20 year old modeller from the South near London. I noted a distinct lack of On30 type stuff on the forum (or at least I haven't stumbled onto it yet!) and thought I would rectify the situation. As a lot of my layout is already built, I shall cheat a bit and let you have snippits of info at a time to keep things interesting. Fortunately I take pictures of everything as I do things so I shall have plenty of archive to fall back on. As its twenty to one at night I won't kick off properly but will instead quickly hammer out a rough guide to myself and the layout.

I started somewhat unsurprisingly with the train set on the floor. The only odd thing was this train set was three rail Hornby Dublo (my other interest!). I eventually got me a two rail set (the Tees Tyne Pullman from Hornby) and this was developed over the next 8 or so years into a bit of an odd layout really. It had fully working signals and reasonable (for my age) scenery but was always let down by the 1st radius curves and the set track. There were check rails everywhere that I fitted in an effort to keep my new Bachmann 4MT Ivatt on the rails (echoing my future career choice of Pway engineer) but it became apparent to me that hobby wise this was a dead end if I wanted to progress to better things. So I ripped my beloved layout (and I still have some regret about it!) back to bare board and I started again.

The layout sat for a bit while I decided what to do. I considered a light railway approach and even re painted some locos to suit (note the green L&Y pug with dumb buffers replaced with spring ones to make a Peckett thingy) but having seen On30 at exhibitions (and having got a bit tired of British OO) I got a Bachmann train set one xmas and that kick started me off.

These models were a totally new thing for me and it has been very exciting. All the locos run superbly and as as example I was astounded about an hour ago when a Porter 0-4-0 crawled round the layout with some log wagons in tow at a very slow speed without once stalling. I've done some bashing and lots of weathering (one of my favourite things) as well as my main interest, scenery.

I'm not entirely hell bent on On30, I do have some OO too and I will sneak that in whenever I come up with something interesting. The new Heljan Kestrel has filled me with more enthusiasm for the more unusual models we have on the market at the moment.

Anyway if you do read this I will endeavour to get the first post up tomorrow evening. In the meantime here's a picture of a very bare board two years ago!

Night!!