Legacy audit

Many years ago i had a series of OO gauge layouts but in my early 20s i put everything away in boxes ready for when i had my own house so could start again. "Starting again" took me nearly 13 years and in the end i have gone for a Continental HOe gauge layout anyway! My legacy OO stock, track and what-not has been stored away in the loft all of these years. They are thus in reasonable condition though haven't run for probably around 20 years! I am conducting an audit of what i have got, to see what can be reused (to be honest not a great deal though i found a box full of OO/HO scale people!) Its nice to compare the OO gauge to HOe in any case. I may try and sell some of this old stuff...

A building

Its about time Eskalon had some sort of building. Here is some sort of building though its a British platform shelter so not exactly correct for the desired layout. The kit is my first card kit and was the one given away free by Railway Modeller last year. It was good to get some practice in (and i need it) plus i may be able to adapt the building at some stage and use it somewhere. It can help me get the clearances right if nothing else.

Our new wagon

Since my initial purchase of a locomotive and 2 carriages earlier in the year i haven't bought any other rolling stock but i thought it was time i got something new, plus i needed a shorter wheelbase vehicle for testing. So i have bought a nice simple open wagon, a Liliput Om open goods wagon. Someone will probably say it never runs on the Zillertalbahn but maybe it just got lost (modellers licence will be heavily applied to Eskalon!)

New track supplies

Today i received the remaining track i needed for the layout and my first wagon. As can be seen from the photos below i now have my fiddleyard siding and the full 3 siding station complex. There arn't likely to be many changes to the track layout for the foreseeable future (no space for a start!) Though there could be a few tweaks before i nail it down.

Revised plan

Because of the reduction in the size of the board the plan has had to be amended a bit (though not as much as you might imagine). Much of this layout is already in place, i just need 3 more sets of points...

Lets build a railway!

My original plan for 2 120x60 boards connected together didn't quite work as it was just far too big in the spare room! So instead i am connecting a 120x35 board (which will form the backscene / fiddleyard area) to one of the 120x60 ones. After much hammering and fastening (and wood wastage) i now have a board! Lets build a railway!

Nothing is nailed down yet (i need some more track anyway) but things are starting to happen at last.

Testing the boards

I still have the fasteners to fix so the two boards can be made into one, and i want to paint the boards with a grey base coat... however its been a while since i've run my train so i thought i'd test the boards out. And they work great!

Our possible layout plan

Now we have finalised the size of the boards we can now finalise the layout plan for Phase 2 as well. This is my current layout design (as created in RailModeller). Its designed to fulfil the brief of combining a loop with shunting interest and can also be split into 2 parts should the layout need to be moved at any time. Now the final layout may not exactly look like this but it will be on the right lines (so to speak). The area at the bottom of the plan will be the "fiddle yard".

Building the boards

I am not very good at woodwork but i seem to have managed to built my boards without any mishaps and even without any swearing. I built a simple frame for each board to give it some rigidity and also somewhere for wires to go safely tucked. Next step will be to get some fasteners so the boards can be bolted together. And then start building a layout...