HORBY JUNCTION.
Welcome to the second blog in this story of my love of model railways and how I turned a hobby into a cottage industry. As I’ve already said like most model railway fanatics it all stared with a Christmas gift when I was just a lad. So how I hear you say did that turn into the Horby Junction layout which is in my spare bedroom?
First decision is what scale to build the model in, by scale I basically mean the size of the trains, track and buildings. Most are either OO gauge or N gauge. Without getting too technical OO scale is the train set we all got as a kid and N gauge is much smaller in size. The advantage of N is you can fit a lot more railway in a small space but the disadvantage is its quite fiddly to build so on balance I plumped for OO gauge. Now I should say that I am in the process of planning a small shelf N gauge railway and I do make models to sell in N gauge (more of which in a future blog).
Once I decided to go down the OO route the next puzzle is the biggest one most modeller face, where to build it. Space is the railway modellers nemesis as most of us don’t have the luxury of a loft or basement, some build in garages and outbuildings and this can work well but temperature changes in summer and winter for both layout and modeller can be shall we say challenging! So after much deliberation our old friend the box bedroom was chosen as the place I would spend many happy hours over the next few years.
Next up was the question of power and control of the trains themselves. The old train set I had as a kid was analogue, put simply the track is powered through a transformer and when the dial is turned the train will move. The problem with this is when you put another train on the track it will move as well so you then have to have isolating tracks etc In recent years however there is a new kid in town, DCC or digital as its known. With this system the track is powered all the time and the train is controlled by a controller that sends a signal to a chip in each individual engine so I can run as many trains as I like without little accidents. Now this is a very basic explanation on how is works for the purposes of this blog and indeed things such as sound chips make DCC the future of model railways. However that’s enough science!
The last decision to make is the track plan itself, what the layout will look like. As it seems with most things in this hobby there are many options, I plumped for and “end to end” configuration. Basically two stations at each end of the baseboard and trains run between them. Again this decision is based on how much space you have to model in, for instance in a large room you could have a full circle of tracks running into a fiddle yard representing the “rest of the country” enabling complex running patterns.
So over the next 5 years or so many happy hours were spent is said bedroom building baseboards, track laying, building scenery, buildings and detailing the model to get to where I am today. I will in the next blog put some pictures up and explain a bit more how the railway evolved but the purpose of this blog was to give some back round into how I got to where I am today with my layout.
The advent of the Internet and things such as EBAY means that running a small business from home its much easier to get you products out to customers but these blogs are more than that, over the next few weeks I’ll show you how I plan the layouts, buildings and track side dioramas. Hopefully this will inspire you to get involved in this great hobby. (you may even want to buy some to get you started).
So for now thanks for reading and I hope over the next few weeks I can share with you how I create my models.
Alan.
Railway Imp 