My One square foot Halt Challenge layout.

Set up at the Granite City Train Show

 The station on my layout doesn't have a name, but if it did it would be something "Road". 

For those blog readers outside the UK, who may not get the reference. Having the word  "Road" after your station name, would indicate that it was not that close to the settlement it was named for. It could have been several miles down twisting country roads to the place in question. For example, Huttoft Mumby Road, a station I knew well growing up in Lincolnshire, was several miles from both Huttoft and Mumby.

So to the layout. The Micro Model Railroad Cartel podcast announced a competition earlier in 2021 to build a micro layout of a small halt station in an area of one square foot. As a nod to the late Carl Arendt who built the world famous Squarefoot Estate Railway, the layout that started the micro layout boom. (confession, the competition was my idea, so I though I'd better enter.) A simple station wouldn't take much time and effort to complete. It could be a bit of a diversion from the Covid situation.

It took me a while to decide on a subject for my layout, as I have so much stock in different scales. But in the end I settled for what I knew. English OO scale. A short platform and a short siding for a little freight operation.  The size is 26" x 5" with a curved back extending to 6". 

At the height of the pandemic, wood for baseboards was next to impossible to get hold of. If you could, you paid an arm and a leg for it. I knew several friends with basement empires who had issues getting hold of lumber for their layouts. So I decided to make my layout without using wood. I made mine using layers of foam and foamcore board. using what I had to hand.

This view of the end of a train storage cassette. Shows the construction of the baseboard. The base is cork faced foam core, 3/8" of 10mm thick. With 1 1/2" expanded polystyrene on top of that. A layer of 1/4" cork title on top of that provides some sound deadening for the track. With sides glued in place, this becomes very rigid, and it is phenomenally light.

Layout wise construction is very conventional using buildings and scenic doodads that I had in stock. The only thing I bough for this project was some people, and static grass tufts. Though the blue foam core board back scene does at a pinch. I'm waiting to find a background more representative of the flat fenland of Lincolnshire before I call this layout truly finished.

The layout made its debut at the Granite City Train show in St Cloud, MN in November. It was well received and the short siding, tuning fork arrangement was quick and easy to work and kept the audience interested. 

The Waggon und Maschinenbau Donauwörth Railbus is typical of short country branchline trains in the rationalisation era of British Railways. It's short and perfect for a micro layout too. 

iPhones can get where cameras often can't. This view really shows how narrow the baseboard is.

Ruston 48DS works a short goods. This wouldn't have happened in real life. The only train a Ruston would work would be a train involved in removing the track after closure. But it's a small loco and I like it. A lot.

This is a favourite scene I put together. Just a couple of guys chatting before loading or unloading the van at the dock.

On reflection, this was a fun layout to build. It didn't take long to complete, and it gives me a chance to give my British stock a run. The tuning fork track plan concept was fun to work and I'm inclined to build another layout, albeit a bit bigger, to run my On30 stock on.