The first question is the one that I get asked the most.
"Why do you build small layouts?"
The simple, and somewhat glib, answer is I don't know anything else.
Right from the start I never had much room. I started with a baseboard that I in a previous existence had served as a base for my Subbuteo table football pitch and I clearly remember getting very fed up with watching trains go around in endless circles and not getting anywhere. I'd make loads of buildings to disguise the fact that the trains were going in circles but it never convinced me. I managed to lay a loop of track that had a siding on the inside and one on the outside. One was called "town yard" and one was named "the docks" so that trains had a real purpose and ran from one location to another but the trains still did a few dozen laps of the oval to get from the town to the docks. Not perfect but better. It was, on reflection, sowing the seeds of developing my own operating sequences.
Then jump forward a few years and I'm now reading the English magazine "Railway Modeller" and here I was introduced to the idea of a modelling just a railway station. One particularly sticks in my mind. A plan of the month by Roy C. Link called "The Art of Compromise" it was a 6' x 1' GWR branchline terminus and it really seared itself on my imagination. I didn't want to copy it. No, it was GWR for a start. But it really opened my eyes to small size realistic model railways. It was a defining moment for me.
Railway Modeller introduced me to other subjects for layouts. Narrow Gauge, trams (trolleycars) for example. I was fascinated by trams for a while and did build a shelf layout based on a tramway running from a Superquick terminus station to a park on a 7' x 1' shelf along a street of scratchbuilt houses. Great fun when it worked properly but my skills at 15 were not what they should have been really.
Then I moved away to college. No room in a student dorm room for a layout, but I was in North Wales and it didn't stop me trying to come up with schemes for a 009 layout of some kind. I remember attempting one in an Airfix model kit box, (Space 1999 eagle transporter it was). the box was reinforced with corrugated cardboard to make a firm surface. (Here I am predating the shoebox layout fad by about 15 years...) Stock was a pair of cutdown Hornby 4 wheel coaches and the loco was an N gauge Grafar 4F that never got converted to a 009 prototype.
After college I discovered beer. Yes I know you're supposed to discover beer AT college but I was too busy planning model railways. So I developed a social life, took up amateur dramatics and did the things normal people did.
I did not desert model railways totally in this time. I served as Chairman of the Mablethorpe and district model railway club for a while and was responsible for part of the 20' long Drinkallby and Belchford Road layout. My section, Belchford Road was not much longer than 8' by itself, another small layout. Even as I left for America there was a baseboard complete with track for another small EM Gauge layout around.
Now married and living in America I was convinced I was going to build a model railroad. A big one.
Nope.
The first thing I did was try to build a small layout using foam core board as I was in an apartment with no tools to cut wood. This was 10 years before Chris Nevard built his groundbreaking foamcore board layout Catcott Burtle. I didn't have his skills so mine was an unmitigated failure.
Then came the next defining moment I discovered this. The Squarefoot Estate Railway. A tiny layout that was interesting to look at and had a purpose. AND it was built from pink insulation foam for Pete's sake. I was hooked. Of course once I had found this the internet opened up my eyes to many other modellers and their creative layouts. I was home. I joined so many forums and researched so many obscure prototypes that when I came to purchasing a house with a large basement I hardly gave building a big layout any thought. Certainly not to building a layout that would take up the entire basement. Once I got my hobby room in the basement sorted I was very prolific:
Apple Valley Light Railway
Tenwr Mine
Whinny Lane
Purespring Watercress
Wold Farm Mushrooms
all quirky small narrow gauge layouts. Some successful, some failures. All vital lessons.
Then of course I've moved on to HO scale and Wingetts Recycling.
Where will I go next?
...
Well. What I hoped would be a concise answer to a question turned into a long nostalgic journey through my model railway life. Which to be honest I've really enjoyed writing and I hope you enjoyed reading. But at least it shows I have never really considered building large layouts. So thats why I build small layouts. I don't know anything else.
"Why do you build small layouts?"
The simple, and somewhat glib, answer is I don't know anything else.
Right from the start I never had much room. I started with a baseboard that I in a previous existence had served as a base for my Subbuteo table football pitch and I clearly remember getting very fed up with watching trains go around in endless circles and not getting anywhere. I'd make loads of buildings to disguise the fact that the trains were going in circles but it never convinced me. I managed to lay a loop of track that had a siding on the inside and one on the outside. One was called "town yard" and one was named "the docks" so that trains had a real purpose and ran from one location to another but the trains still did a few dozen laps of the oval to get from the town to the docks. Not perfect but better. It was, on reflection, sowing the seeds of developing my own operating sequences.
Then jump forward a few years and I'm now reading the English magazine "Railway Modeller" and here I was introduced to the idea of a modelling just a railway station. One particularly sticks in my mind. A plan of the month by Roy C. Link called "The Art of Compromise" it was a 6' x 1' GWR branchline terminus and it really seared itself on my imagination. I didn't want to copy it. No, it was GWR for a start. But it really opened my eyes to small size realistic model railways. It was a defining moment for me.
Railway Modeller introduced me to other subjects for layouts. Narrow Gauge, trams (trolleycars) for example. I was fascinated by trams for a while and did build a shelf layout based on a tramway running from a Superquick terminus station to a park on a 7' x 1' shelf along a street of scratchbuilt houses. Great fun when it worked properly but my skills at 15 were not what they should have been really.
Then I moved away to college. No room in a student dorm room for a layout, but I was in North Wales and it didn't stop me trying to come up with schemes for a 009 layout of some kind. I remember attempting one in an Airfix model kit box, (Space 1999 eagle transporter it was). the box was reinforced with corrugated cardboard to make a firm surface. (Here I am predating the shoebox layout fad by about 15 years...) Stock was a pair of cutdown Hornby 4 wheel coaches and the loco was an N gauge Grafar 4F that never got converted to a 009 prototype.
After college I discovered beer. Yes I know you're supposed to discover beer AT college but I was too busy planning model railways. So I developed a social life, took up amateur dramatics and did the things normal people did.
I did not desert model railways totally in this time. I served as Chairman of the Mablethorpe and district model railway club for a while and was responsible for part of the 20' long Drinkallby and Belchford Road layout. My section, Belchford Road was not much longer than 8' by itself, another small layout. Even as I left for America there was a baseboard complete with track for another small EM Gauge layout around.
Now married and living in America I was convinced I was going to build a model railroad. A big one.
Nope.
The first thing I did was try to build a small layout using foam core board as I was in an apartment with no tools to cut wood. This was 10 years before Chris Nevard built his groundbreaking foamcore board layout Catcott Burtle. I didn't have his skills so mine was an unmitigated failure.
Then came the next defining moment I discovered this. The Squarefoot Estate Railway. A tiny layout that was interesting to look at and had a purpose. AND it was built from pink insulation foam for Pete's sake. I was hooked. Of course once I had found this the internet opened up my eyes to many other modellers and their creative layouts. I was home. I joined so many forums and researched so many obscure prototypes that when I came to purchasing a house with a large basement I hardly gave building a big layout any thought. Certainly not to building a layout that would take up the entire basement. Once I got my hobby room in the basement sorted I was very prolific:
Apple Valley Light Railway
Tenwr Mine
Whinny Lane
Purespring Watercress
Wold Farm Mushrooms
all quirky small narrow gauge layouts. Some successful, some failures. All vital lessons.
Then of course I've moved on to HO scale and Wingetts Recycling.
Where will I go next?
...
Well. What I hoped would be a concise answer to a question turned into a long nostalgic journey through my model railway life. Which to be honest I've really enjoyed writing and I hope you enjoyed reading. But at least it shows I have never really considered building large layouts. So thats why I build small layouts. I don't know anything else.
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