1. Starting yet another blog?

Welcome. 

Do I really need another blog? Maybe I do, anyway here we go….

On here there will be trains, mostly model trains, big (SM32) and small (2mm FS) and others in between.

Starting off with, and likely to be the early main focus of this blog, a layout currently known as Coales Mill Yard — a fledgling 2mm finescale working cameo.

Inspiration — A few months back I opened a magazine for a bit of a browse, Model Railway Journal (MRJ) 150 as it happens, and was struck by that feeling — the one that you know from previous experience — that the scene in the article in front of you cannot be ignored. 

This has happened before. Previously it led to a 7mm scale model of the Wantage Tramway terminus in its heyday, with baulk road made from aluminum rails and some scratch-built buildings. In this case the trigger was an article in British Railways Illustrated with pictures of the tramway disappearing between very adjacent buildings on both sides. Sadly this layout was eventually abandoned and dismantled before I got to run anything, a victim of circumstances.

The pictures in MRJ 150 were of Coales Mill in Newport Pagnell in the 1950/60 era, then a small town with an Aston Martin factory, now a part of the Milton Keynes conurbation with a motorway service station and sadly, no Aston Martin factory any more. The MRJ photos look to be taken at least a decade apart, but the core buildings are present in all of them, and it was these Victorian structures, variously sized and shaped, jammed together on the gentle curves of the sidings in front and Broad Street behind.

The layout — The photo shows my most advanced schema to date, its just 4 sheets of A4 paper sellotaped together with printed Finetrax templates glued on on and Easitrack plain tracks placed between them. The plastic shells of some of the Mill buildings also appear.

This all takes place on the kitchen table, and its too big for either the table or my standard safe storage which is a lidded plastic box used upside down like a cake cover. The layouts have to be stored on racking in the garage so they need to be damp proof. This has worked well so far with Greater Greygates, an EM trial run based around a Scalescenes shed, and mostly card and paper. 

To fit the box the plan needs to be shorter and, to fit the reality, the leftmost sidings should be gently curved. I'm hoping to do all this in Templot soon, which means a trip down memory lane back to Windows, so some cobwebs will have to be swept off an old PC from somewhere. I do just about everything else on an iPad these days.

That will do for starters, next time we’ll look at the Mill and examine how I managed to build part of it far too big. To answer my original question, this blog is partly for me. Its a form of diary, a log of work, thoughts, inspirations, and aspirations. You may enjoy it too. I hope so.

Thanks for looking in.

John

Future subjects:

The Mill

Layouts roundup

Stock review

Loco review