This layout blog is about the design and construction of the model railway that I am building for my 6-year old son, Seth. It is also the first model railway we have built.

Because we live in a tiny Victorian terrace there is no room for grand schemes and we have decided that for our first effort we will stick to a compact book-shelf layout and so that we can fit in as much as possible it will be N-gauge. We don't know much about trains other than we like watching and riding on them (we live a few hundred yards across a field from a small village station), and that we like playing with model trains, particularly modern diesels and EMUs.

As we don't know much about trains or tracks I thought it would best to follow someone else's lead and use an existing layout as the basis for our own. After much Googling I found a superb modern-image diesel layout listed on this very site, Dudley Road. I contacted its creator, Pete Harvey, to ask if he would mind if we used his plan as the basis for our layout. He has very kindly consented. Thank you, Pete.

Dudley Road is OO and 8' long by 1' wide. As we will modelling in N-gauge this roughly reduces to 4' long by 6" wide. We're going to maintain the 4' length as I have several pre-cut 1200mm x 600mm MDF sheets but I will make it a deeper at around 8-9" so that I can add a little more scenic architecture along the back edge than Dudley Road. A plan has been put together using XTrkCad and, as I would like to be as detailed as possible, I will be using Peco Streamline Code 55 track. The only problem is finding a 3-way point in Code 55 - I hear rumour that Peco are releasing an asymmetric point in 2010 but no news about as yet.

The next step will be to build the baseboard. Hopefully another update will follow soon.

Peter & Seth