Well 2021 has begun, we have been put into a national lockdown and I have a model railway that has really started moving since all the baseboard materials were delivered on the 31st December. 

A little bit about me in my first ever blog post. I received my first Hornby train set - The Flying Scotsman of course - as a christmas present with my twin brother aged 11. For the preceding few years we received more and more additional bits of track and a couple of locomotives from family members. We never however had space for it to become any more than a rainy day activity to be put away every evening. 

Well the years past and 2019 meant that me and my now fiancé moved into our first property. We are super lucky that the house has a nice sized loft which she agreed I could turn into space for me to be able to model in. Well now its the beginning of 2021 and I have finished preparing the space in a way that we could on our budget and have begun to build the baseboards to fit the space in a way that means I have a good size to model but there is also space for storage. 

Just after finishing boarding the loft space. 

The space with added insulation and the timber in place to begin building the baseboard frames. I have now finished all apart from the baseboard around the chimney breast but I haven’t taken a picture yet. 

Now onto the track plan and layout the I will eventually bring to life. I have spent may hours looking at books, forums on here and other websites and real lift from many hours travelling to and from London for work. I have decided that Southeast England is my desired modelling location, and I have really enjoyed learning about my local railways from 1980 till today so have picked this as a rough time to be modelling in. With DMUs and EMUs in mind the layout would need sheds/storage space to hold this rolling stock, a station that could take the same trains and then the potential of some kind of maintenance department. Below is what I have come up with. It is by no where near a final plan and I’m sure it will change loads before I pin the track down the final time but it for me is a definitely a start. 

This is going to be a massive learning curve for me. For a job i work in automation so I will definitely be including automated systems e.g. the faller car system, in to the layout as well as home build extras which I’m sure I will experiment and work on as I build the railway. 

Well here’s to a year of modelling and learning all the skills along with that. I hope I can update this blog as and when I have significant advancements in the layout. 

H