It's based on a board of 42 by 185cm to fit on top of my ikea expedit bookcase. The layout is a loose and entirely freelance combination of things I'm passionate about, including Art Deco buildings, Narrow Gauge (Nn3), viaducts, and of course streamliners.
The buildings I've designed for the left hand side are meant to be a kind of Art Deco Airport/Station transport hub. This is primarily to give me an excuse to have a weird mixture of zeppelin and cool luftwaffe aircraft in the layout (I've purchased a 1/144 scale Horten IX and a He 111 for this purpose, doubtless more will come!)
The airport building (formed from PVC hemisphere section and laminations of 3mm styrene profiles):
Youtube flyround of the Airport:
The main city railway station just below the airport on the diagram. It will be a kitbash using a Faller 222128 Overall Station Roof. If you can't already tell I have a bit a love affair with the faller range of kits!
First draft of the layout:
Second draft was improved by giving the left hand curve a longer run to get up the viaduct level gradient. The Z gauge/Nn3 track (the red one) has been changed totally (partially to avoid spending £100 on points). It will now serve to deliver freight to the dock side, and to go through to the town/village - at some point this will be running on little trestles to take it high enough to pass over the secondary/village shuttle track. (See the dockside railway at Morwellham Quay for my original motivation for building a narrow gauge railway and the trestles - though mine will be heavier duty - gallery of images courtesy of the BBC at ). The secondary track running around the village/town area now has a loop as well as a siding that will run in to the Iron Foundry model area. It uses almost entirely Tomix track which allows very tight radii, but only short locos will be running on it. It now joins the main track in a much neater joint inside a mountain tunnel (with side access panels). The village/town will now have a church, a less formal platform/station area, and a definite "town square" area with roman cobbling. The main express loop will run below the town level to allow the secondary track to run round without the cobbled together multiple crosses. The section coloured dark grey will be a visible cutting.
Third Draft....
Changes after chat with some chaps on the Mac DCC yahoo mailing list (amazing find for dedicated apple-lites like myself) include:
-Secondary loop pretty much totally reworked and another join to the primary track added. The village platform can now be access on both sides by the express track to allow passing by.
- there's now a story (ish) to go with the narrow gauge and the brewery (iron foundry faller building kit with a bit of kit bashing for no other reason than I like beer and the overhead gantry thing remind me of the guiness storehouse in dublin). There will be two type of freight on the line (now to be shunted with my streamline tank!), tipper wagons to deliver an unspecified ore material and some kind of barrel or beer material carrying wagons that will give me an excuse to run the Nn3 line into the village over the trestles etc in homage to Morwellham Quay! The idea being the dock also serves for internation beer haulage when it's not home to the ship collecting mining ore. The secondary line (which may or may not be served by the Rail-Zeppelin if I can get it to take those turns) will have a siding into the brewery to deliver workers at the beginning of the work day.
Comments and suggestions all welcome!
K
No comments:
Post a Comment