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Progress. It is slow - but imminent. Some landscaping work has been done with the lake section of the layout. The enbankment has now it's basic coat of sand and also some grass - where the weed killers of the period didn't reach them. Also the ground of the forest has received it's basic coating, static grass alternating with sandy ground. The lake itself is yet to receive it's final surface. The mound behind the track is representing a ridge that was created from sand by the melting ice during the end of the last ice age. The railway at the shoreline of such ridge might look a bit exotic but it has a match in the real world - there are places where railway follows such shoreline for miles in southeastern part of the country. Later the nearest part of the ridge will get bushes and small trees. Behind that, some birches and other broadleaf trees and the majority of the forest will be pines which are typical for such setting.

Exactly! And when the outside of the wheels are at the correct place, for example the motion gear and cylinders of a steam engine don't need to be widened and so on. Also, it's possible to replace the commonly used RP25/110 wheels with ones that are correct width to scale and use the correct gauge without other modifications. Meanwhile, third attempt with the base colour of the lake gave the desired effect. The shallower shores need some touches of brown in same manner as in the river photo above. After other necessary detailing has been done the water can be modelled with Vallejo's Still Water.

nhy581: Thank you so much for the comments, as well as everybody else I might not have mentioned! I'm still gobsmacked by all these comments I couldn't have imagined getting among all the great modelling one can find on this site. I'll try to keep this thread updated - whenever I have actually time to get on with the project. A good note from NGT6 1315, the track is actually standard Peco Code75. I have considered trying to build a layout with the correct 17.5 mm gauge but never seen it worth the effort really. On the other hand I've been thinking of building something in the 0 scale and with that I calculated that by choosing the scale 1:48 and using the standard 32 mm gauge track it is pretty much exactly correct. But with H0, mea culpa! Caradoc: wonderful anecdote! Just like certain unreliable trains today; you sit in it for ages and the name of the station stays the same! Your story reminds me of the Soviet Union passenger coaches, one of them had a huge text PECTOPAH on the side and as a kid I was wondering who is so important he has his name on the coach like that. Allegheny1600: Unusuality is all in the perspective - if I'll one day do something really exotic to me, I'll build a GWR branch line layout (which I'd love to do actually, being a huge fan of railways of Britain). :-)

£1.38: A very good point, works especially with the dense spruce forest which will probably be a big mass of green at the back of the layout. SHMD: Actually I've been toying with the winter setting for many years but never done anything like that. Perhaps I just hate winter too much! I have also an older and smaller layout project that was originally meant to be an exhibition layout but eventually I didn't think it would be good enough. I wanted to create the feeling of a GWR branch line terminus in a Finnish setting - although a branch lines is something we don't really have here at all. Now the layout is still very much unfinished and serves as my test bench for landscaping ideas. Here's some detail photos that won't reveal how much work-in-progress -state it really is in. The locomotive is kit built, everything else built from scratch. A station building and a small warehouse, original design from late 1860's: A larger warehouse from the same period with an industrial Bjurström-type locomotive built in 1:1 by Finnish manufacturer Lokomo: A narrow river is crossed while approaching the station:

Thank you very much for everybody! I hope I can provide regular updates about the project. To be honest the progress has been rather slow so far, there has been periods of months of no progress because of all the other things going on. The beginning of the work for the layout actually dates all the way back to 2011. A very good note from SHMD about the trees! I have estimated I need at least four hundred trees for the layout. Actually, one of the sections will be almost entirely forest. I'm going to follow mostly the methods described in Gordon Gravett's books when making the trees which takes quite a bit of time for each tree so I'm anticipating the tree making task with horror. The other signature element is water - as Chris there quite correctily pointed out - the layout should represent the part of the country where there is a lot of lakes, another one of the sections has a large portion of it covered by water.

Greetings, I have been reading this forum for years and finally decided to write about my current layout project to see if there are people here interested of a Finnish layout. The concept of the layout is to represent Finnish countryside in the late thirties. All buildings date back to 1900-1910 making that the earliest correct time period and with some alternations in the details the period can be stretched all the way to the 1950’s so a great variety of rolling stock can be used. The layout consists of four sections each of them have 1200x600mm scenic area which makes the whole layout just under five metres long. The basic structure of the section has two overlapping insulation board pieces glued together. The rear side of the section has a 100mm wide shelf for wiring and other electrics including point motors. The sections are aligned together with steel L-profiles with conical pins and matching holes for precise alignment. An mdf board pieces have been glued to the insulation boards to form an even and smooth surface where the track can be nailed to. All electrical wiring is in plastic tubing that runs under the scenery from the back of the layout to the desired point. Same applies to the point motors, they are at back and operate the points by a metal rod inside a metal tubing. So far track has been laid for all sections and the scenery has been painted with brownish green base colour. The basic scenery – which means static grass – has been applied on one of the sections. The rolling stock will be mostly out of the box and modified kits and also some hand built items. I have also some locomotives under development using mostly etched and 3d-printed parts. I’d be happy to hear if there are people here interested of Finnish model railways, thank you for reading!