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Enjoy!

Great to hear you are making progress. JJPDs were very common in the late 80s. The 303 class shunters, green with yellow lines, were also a common sight at any freight terminal.

Hi Chris, You can check this issue of the Tren magazine for prototypes https://issuu.com/revistatren/docs/tren-12-esp-issuu. You would still see plenty of 2 axle freight cars in the 80s with both wooden and increasingly metal bodies. They have the Gbs and the Jfvc in Mabar and other shops. Bogie cars with sliding doors for parcels were also to be seen both attached to passenger express trains or in special parcel trains. There was a huge variety of tank cars, cement cars, platforms etc including some private (i.e. CAMPSA) and ancient examples equipped with vacuum brakes. Hope that helps. It was in 1986 when I bought my first railway magazine, Trenes Hoy.

I have been painting the sides of the rails. I found the process a pain in N scale, but worthwhile. It has been a breeze with the Woodland Scenics pen.

That's wonderful and inspiring.

Finally I had some time to take a couple of pictures. I have laid down most of the track some time ago. I am also showing the engine house mockup which will hide the entrance from the main fiddle yard. I am now working on the background boards and experimenting with neodymium magnets for uncoupling.

Thanks. I like your approach better than anything I can see in the videos. Your magnets go in between the sleepers so there is not need to mount the track on a foam or a cork bed.

Brilliant! I love the way the little locos go over the points without any hiccups. Also, the [lack of] ballasting is refreshing and goes well with the style.

That's nice. What is the size of your board? Did you secure it with screws or only with glue?

That could be the end of a steam tram line. The trams could have a passenger trailer and a van. You could a point to shunt the van into a siding. You could then have some fun shunting a loaded van out of the siding and an empty in, then form the train to depart.

I'll give a bit of background and design philosophy to the layout. Most important are the constraints I face. I want to run the layout on the dining table, which is 158cm long and about 1m wide. Additionally, I managed to wrestle a cupboard from the missus for storage. That limits the size of the baseboard to 27x101. The height of the background won't be higher than 19-20cm from the baseboard. I am using Peco set track. It looks quite nice and so far works far better than some dodgy Atlas track I had. The set track points are the shortest in the Peco range, which allows turning around a 6 wagon long train. The Peckett B2 performs reasonable well over the frogs. I can even get through a crawling speed if the turnout is perfectly flat and I say a pray to St Anthony. The layout will be fed via two connections, one next to the west entrance and another to the southmost track to feed the toe of the turnout giving access to the engine house. By the way, the engine house will hide the west entrance. The north exit goes into a factory of sorts. The factory, with this entrance plus a loading dock in the northmost track will be a major feature of the layout. I think I am going for a crowded industrial look, perhaps with a little passenger next to the east entrance. The corners of the background will then be covered by buildings rather than curved. I am thinking of a George Stubbs/Wallace & Gromit as inspirations. Back to the wiring, I would like to keep it simple and have a simple one out of the layout. Initially, the layout will be DC. Because there will be only one or two locomotives in it at any time, it will be easy enough to convert to DCC in the future keeping the insulfrog turnouts. Those will be manually operated, in any case. Otherwise, coupling will be Kadee automatic (which I think it is a lot of fun). The only reason for DCC is sound. That will be challenging to install in the Peckett. I am looking to the Hornby 08 with TTS.

I made a baseboard and I am very proud of myself.

I noticed the banana van was today refusing to couple or uncouple. I found no problem with the coupling itself, Kadee, but with the plastic tabs which work as springs to center the NEM box. Is that a known problem with Dapol? Would it be easy to replace the box and its mount with the better Hornby design? Or do I need to find a Dapol replacement and pray it lasts?

I think I am getting somewhere with the track plan. First of all, the baseboard is reduced now to 27x101. The engine house is on a spur to the left and will cover the entrance. A short passenger platform will be located just between the entrance and the fracture siding to the north. The top parallel track serves a loading dock with room for three wagons, the middle is the run around and the lower will work for storage of loads.