Thursday, January 24, 2013

Project Eskalon, what is it?

This is a blog about my return to railway modelling and is called Project Eskalon. But what is it? Well Eskalon is the project name for my new layout. Why Eskalon? No idea, the name just popped into my head and it stuck. When my new layout is built Eskalon will be the name of the station, now the layout will be based in Austria and Eskalon doesn't sound terribly Germanic but its a better name than trying to make up a name. It will be my layout anyway and i can call it whatever i like!

As the project is now moving forward i have created a dedicated blog for it, some earlier posts on my personal blog have been moved here to provide some background. So then what exactly is the project...

For years i had model railways (usually OO scale but with one N scale attempt) but in my early 20s i stopped due to space reasons mostly but i kept all of my stock, track and buildings in boxes ready for a relaunch one day. When i had my own house i finally though i had the space for a new layout but it still took me 10 years to get around to it! The catalyst for returning to railway modelling is probably my return to Airfix models a couple of years ago, this got me back into the world of glue and tiny paintbrushes. In fact some of my models i made last year make up a small train (in OO scale).

I have decided upon a HOe scale layout based on the Austrian Zillertalbahn. Phase 1 of Project Eskalon will be to buy a train, a loop of track and a power controller so i can get used to operation again and also test out some layout ideas. This hopefully can begin next month. Following on from this will be phase 2 which will be a proper layout on a dedicated board and a more interesting layout.

This blog also will include my Airfix modelling where the subject is railway focussed such as the train i built last year.