RSS Fetcher Posted October 14, 2009 Share Posted October 14, 2009 Hello all, The new look forum, and the fact that I'm off work sick and have time on my hands, has inspired me to jump in with one of these new fangled blogs. I guess time will tell if these things work or not... Anyway, a bit of history first. I??™m fairly new to the hobby, having last owned a train set when I was at school and my Hornby HST set was my prized possession (was that really 30 years ago?). A couple of years ago I was reintroduced by a friend of mine who has a large garage sized layout and I??™ve since bought a handful of locos (mainly Bachmann but also a Hornby 08) for when we ???play trains??™ every couple of months. Early in 2007 I decided that I really need a layout of my own but as space was at a premium I restricted myself to a simple plank shunting yard. My darling wife and I then decided to move house so, before it was properly wired, my layout was packed up in preparation http://www.rmweb.co.uk/community/public/style_emoticons/default/rolleyes.gif I signed up with RMWeb about 18 months ago, full of enthusiasm for building a new layout to be called Rodents' Vale, as the house move had left me with an outbuilding to do with as I pleased! I made a few postings and published some track plan ideas but, as is often the case, life got in the way and I wasn't able to move on with it as quickly as I'd hoped http://www.rmweb.co.uk/community/public/style_emoticons/default/icon_mutter.gif I stopped posting on the old forum as, being a complete novice I didn't really have much to add, although I still lurked on a regular basis, if only to maintain the inspiration. All that has now changed and I have a target of getting something running by Christmas! The building at my disposal is an almost equal 'L' shape, approximately 4.5m long in each direction and about 2.2m wide overall. It was built by the previous owner for his hobby(?) of breeding chinchillashttp://www.rmweb.co.uk/community/public/style_emoticons/default/huh.gif - hence the layout name - but forutnately the smell has gone now. It's changed quite a lot since that picture was taken though. One of the things that's slowed me down is that the building wasn't in as good a condition as I first thought and works to make it useable have included a new roof and guttering, cladding some of the external walls, insulating and cladding the inside. The latter is now almost complete and I hope to be building baseboards in the next few weeks! I should probably point out at this stage that I??™m not, by any stretch, a fine scale modeller. My interests lie more in the operational side of railways so my locos and rolling stock will be RTR and my track will be off-the-shelf. My plans for the latter are to use Peco code 75 points and either Peco or SMP flexitrack, but I??™d welcome other suggestions that don??™t involve hand making the stuff. The era I??™m aiming for is late 70??™s ??“ early 80??™s ??“ blue diesels are my ???thing??™ although I??™m not going to restrict myself too much. My friends' layout is really set up for freight operations and so mine, partly just to have something different and partly because of my beautiful new HST, will include a main line terminus station. Operation will be DCC and I've just taken delivery of a Gaugemaster Prodigy Advance2, which I'm very pleased with. My friend uses the same system on his layout, which makes for ease of operation when visiting. It also means that we can pool controllers when we're operating as a group, and we've both bought one additional controller for this purpose. So there you go. I doubt that my layout will progress in the leaps and bounds that some seem to ??“ partly because the space isn??™t even ready yet but also partly because I??™ve never done anything like this before. The latter will ensure I??™ll have lots of questions to ask toohttp://www.rmweb.co.uk/community/public/style_emoticons/default/biggrin.gif View the full article Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
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