I HAVE A CUNNING PLAN.

Hi and welcome my latest Shirebrook yard blog.

Somebody once said “measure twice, cut once”. Now I agree if you cutting wood that’s great advice and from a railway modellers point of view I can’t stress enough how important planning is. Soon we will get on to the good bit, track planning but before that it’s important to have the right tools for the job and the right invironment to work in. I for instance as you can see have a limited space to work with in my railway room. My good lady is also not a fan of me using spray paints, turps washes etc in the house and I’ve got to be honest it does whiff a bit! The solution is the good old garden shed which as I’ve said previously is not my preferred choice as a railway room but as a second workshop it’s perfect. (As you can see, although it’s not yet finished) . After a day clearing the shed out (many spiders met their match that day!) the next job was to get the tools for the job.

Having the right equipment might sound a obvious thing to say but my advice is to get good quality tools to do the job, my workbench as you can see cost a bit more but its much sturdier. Over the years I’ve acquired a whole host of tools to build railways but to build to a standard for selling on to the public or indeed for your own layout this is an area not to cut corners on. As and when I’m using various tools over the coming weeks I’ll talk in a little more detail.

So we’ve got the tools, we’ve got workings space now we need a plan for in my case the micro layout range and the dioramas for my Ebay shop.

First things first, the baseboard. I have always found 6mm MDF to be adequate for this task. It’s strong and just as importantly fairly inexpensive. Plywood can also be used but this is more expensive and after all railways don’t come cheap so where I can I’ll try and save a bit. As you can see I’ve got some 1200 x 600 boards ready for cutting and indeed you can just make out the first one is marked up.

The next step is to strengthen it with plywood battoning, not only does this make the board more rigid it also keeps them level which when it comes to running trains is paramount.

So thats the planning done and the baseboard built. At this point I should point out that as I’m building micro layouts by definition they are to fit in small spaces and the track plan fits the board rather than designing the railway and then building the required size base boards which is probably the normal way of doing it.

On the next blog I’ll show how I came up with the themes for the layouts and the track plan.

For now though, happy modelling.

Alan.