The great thing and perhaps the worst is the ability to order up your own aerial photographs from in this case Google Earth to look at the location you have chosen and make sure it meets your requirements. Having identified the potential from train Simulator and confirmed with a couple of trips on the train the next thing was the aerial views. I've actually managed to do some screenshots from the google earth site using paint and included them below

You can see the main London-Brighton line on the right had side of the picture with London towards the top. Gatwick is the next station northbound and Three Bridges southbound. At this level of zoom you can just see the main sidings and also where the old sidings ran but which are now roads. My original planning was to use the units running along Gatwick road with the larget warehouses as the backscene. Once the sizings and look of the layout started to come together this became impractical and so I have had to bring some of the larger warehouses forward and adjust some of the positions slightly to create the scene. Just south of here is a road bridge and I'm going to use this as the southen exit . There is a bridge futher north but too far away to be effective. The buildings in the North are part of a Bus depot and I'll hide the return curve behind one of the warehouses. Summersvere woods in the south and the Hedge line after the cement works to the north are then set to frame the cement works and Agggregate yard. The other main section is Burdens years which borders summesvere woods to the south.

The picture above zooms in on the northern part of the site, The Cement works are in the north and the site of what looks like an old loading platform just below the hedge line. You can see a lot of cars parked in the north, unbelieveably this appears to be overflow parking from Gatwick, Not sure the owners would have know there car was going to be parked between an aggregate yard and cement Facility for a few weeks. In the Middle of the shot you can see the main aggregate building, Light green and this will form the main part of the Layout and will be subject of its own blog post when its made, The Railheads are interesting as the one which goes up the north side of the aggregates building is heavily obscured by aggregates and right at the entrance totally obscured by the vehcle track. At the bottom of the picture you can see the northern end of Burdens Yard.

In the view above I've shown the potential line of the backscene with the buildings I'm going to drag forward to make as very low relief for the backscene. I'm still not sure at this point how the main Aggregates building will look or what to do about the backscene to the north of it.

Next post the site visit and some photos. Managed to get a few from the train over the period, never great pictures but here's one from the Main line