For a layout to work properly (especially if other people are going to be watching it) there needs to be a purpose and a possibility that a ficticious layout could have happened in reality. For these reasons a feasible location was required for "Aberdeen Coaching Stock Depot". We did not want to try to model Clayhills depot because it would have been too long and the station is very close, instead an alternative location was required.

My idea was to use the site of Kittybrewster shed as below:

Kittybrewster is just to the north of Aberdeen station.

Glenn in the meantime had looked at Craiginches Yard, about a mile and a half to the south of the station:

A rough sketch had been made by Glenn as to the design of the layout and I downloaded XtrkCAD to check how everything fitted. Mention must now be made of the fact that I had insisted on a full length HST rake thus the original argument to utilise short trains to ensure a smaller layout had been completely throw out of the window! The XtrkCAD image is shown plus a simplified plan (extended vertically for clarity) as below. This plan has changed very little over the months, only the removal of a loco maintenance building by the carriage shed and the need for the far end crossover were required from the initial scribbled idea.

The layout had now grown to be 24 feet long!

Glenn then dropped the bombshell that Aberdeen has only 2 through platforms, all the rest are bays. The argument for Kittybrewster was removed in one go and the location of Craiginches was chosen. We always stated that Clayhills was needed for City Centre redevelopment (as per Guild Street yard on the other side of the station), and Bob-65B has told us that this plan was actually looked at in the 1980s with a view to using Craiginches Yard - strange how a ficticious layout could have happened in reality.

One of the roads running near to Craiginches Yard is Kirkhill Road, hence the reason for the name Aberdeen Kirkhill. Another of Glenn's ideas but it does have a nice ring to it.