Shirebrook Station nearing completion, Shirebrook Yard sold!

A few weeks ago I started this blog to help grow my business and encourage others to come be part of the great hobby that is model railways. Must admit wasn’t sure if anybody would be interested in either the blog or the layouts. Well nearly 700 views on the blog and this week SHIREBROOK YARD sold, bit like your first born leaving home!

Since the last blog SHIREBROOK STATION is now finished. As you can see from the pics below this I quite a simple layout, a country station branch line with a small goods yard and a single track engine shed. On the face of it it doesn’t look like there’s much scope for movements but actually each train will be mixed both passenger and goods so this will allow for shunting of goods into the siding and exchange of engines for work on the engine shed.

This was a fairly streight foward layout to construct but next its back to SHIREBROOK YARD but with an upgrade! This time I’m going to have track on two levels. Obviously this gives more scope for movement and is usually esthetically pleasing. So how will this work? Well if you remember the original layout had a retaining wall to the rear of the layout which just served as foreground for the back scene, this time that will be replaced with a coaling stage fed from the upper line and refuelled at the lower level. I’ll show plans for this on the next blog but this plan did cause one problem. As you know I’ve been using Metcalfe card kits for my buildings but for the coaling stage it’s going to have to be scratch built. After trawling through archive pics I came up with my design.

The main structure is built out of foam board and brick card, main reason for card is so the scratch build looks the same as the a Metcalfe kits. (well almost!).