The New Layout.

So, what am I going to do for a new layout?

Firstly, I want to try to keep it to a dekstop - 1200 x 600mm. So far I've compromised to make it 1350 x 600 due to practicality of curves, points and set-track options.

I spent a lot of time looking at track layouts and puzzling.

I used Google maps to find small German towns and look at how they are layed out and where the railway runs. I got pretty keen on having a railway station by a river with a town elevated next to the station.

I've filled up lots of scrap paper with doodles. In fact, some folks spotted my doodling at work and thought I'd gone even more crazy. Just as well I didn't 'fess up that it was for a model railroad (actually, I did!).

I found this really hard to do free-hand so I made some simple templates up in powerpoint. You can see below that I'd drawn up a scale grid with some parallel curves at each end and outlined the baseboard in red. I managed to squeeze 5 sketch layouts onto an A4 page.

Now, there are, of course, a lot of resources on the web and I've listed my favourite one here: Small Trackplans. I really did not see anything here that caughtmy imagination.

Of course, there are always books: Sixty Plans for Small Railways, Book of Model Railway Track Plans. Of course, there is always Hobbyco's offering which was a pleasant surprise.

Having continued to dig on the web, I later found something that I knew was just the ticket. It was a small HO layout here (copyright.....Reinoud Kaasschieter, Nederland/The Netherlands). 

Here are the images:

HO Layout showing tunnels.

HO Layout showing set track part numbers.

What I then had to do was translate it to N and to use Peco track. Also, how about my beloved tram?

It will run along the road shown above which goes from the sttion to the church on the hill.

This has a station and two hidden sections inside tunnels that I can hold trains in if I want to.