Rabbit holes - Mosslanda

 Once in a while something appears on the internet and you think to yourself. "Ooh. That's imteresting. I'll look into that." One such thing happened the other day, when reading James Hilton's always interesting blog. 

In this particular post he was describing a scheme for a small layout inspired by Wrexham Central/ Wrecsam Canolog station in North Wales. Straight off this appealed to me. I lived in Wrexham for two years when I was an Art Student. I knew the old, run down Central Station quite well. I would take the train up to Bidston and into Liverpool. Once to the National Garden Festival. (There, that dates me.) 

The station has changed since those days. In fact, that station and its environs that included the station and the Wrexham Lager Brewery has all gone, replaced by a new shopping centre and modern station. This new station has an extremely short platform, long enough for a three car DMU, and a magnificent light and airy modern station building. It all comes down to a great minimum space SLT layout, in any scale. 

By Roger Cornfoot, CC BY-SA 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=94960109

By Rept0n1x - Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=26496687

But it wasn't just this that piqued my interest. James principally models in N scale and he was proposing fitting his scheme into a Mosslanda shelf from IKEA. 

I have experience with IKEA products. I was after all, the man who discovered the APA Box for model railways. To this day, modellers are using all kinds of storage boxes from IKEA to build layouts in. As I had never heard of the Mosslanda before I decided to do some research.

It's a fibreboard picture shelf some 21 3/4" inches long and 4 3/4" deep (550mm x 120mm), with a short front ledge and channel in the shelf to keep pictures upright, (there’s also a 45 1/4” long version). As it's a shelf unit it comes in a range of colours to match your home’s decor. 

A couple of views of the Mosslanda shelf

Being so short and narrow it would probably only be suitable for 9mm gauge and narrower track, maybe TT at a pinch. I found a piece of wood that was approximately the right size, so I placed some Z (6.5mm) scale track on it to get a feel for the size. My goodness that is small! I found that I could even fit a siding on there for a tuning fork plan. This reminded me of an old John Allison layout in Railway Modeller from July 1973 when he build a Z scale layout on a carpenters folding ruler.

As small a tuning fork layout as you could get

There are things that intrigue me about the Mosslanda. The groove in the shelf that holds a picture in place could carry some wiring. Perhaps a piece of brass rod or channel could help locate your chosen train storage method when operating this micro.

The narrowness of the shelf is a bit of a concern. According to James’ post, when you take into account the front and rear upright faces you loose about 30mm (about an inch and a quarter) in depth. I wonder if perhaps scenery could be extended forwards over the top of the front ledge to get back a valuable 15mm. Fifteen millimeters is wider than a section of Z scale flexible track. A section of N scale track is 17mm wide, so 15mm is important.

A thought about fitting a baseboard into a Mosslanda

As someone who flits between scales like a butterfly does between flowers. Having working, self contained, scenically developed shelf units like these displaying my work has an appeal. It would be nice to finish off and display my Nn3 work from earlier in the year and have it make a short run through some landscape rather than having them hidden away. 

Those are my first thoughts about the Mosslanda shelf. I think a trip to IKEA may be in order in the near future. I see these shelves are on sale right now…