The idea behind this blog is to describe the construction of a very small model railway. Some background: until my late teens I was an enthusiastic railway modeller. I started innumerable layouts in various scales, but none of them ever seemed to progress beyond the basic scenery stage. I dabbled in EM gauge and built a fully compensated chassis for an Airfix '4F' which almost ran. Then, like most teenagers I discovered cars, girls and beer. Railway modelling was desperately uncool: also my father had moved overseas. He was an early pioneer in 'N' gauge: if anyone reading this was at the Doncaster model railway exhibition in around 1973 and remembers a scratch-built model of the prototype HST whizzing round a large 'N' gauge layout, that was him. My father was the inspiration for my own modelling efforts, and without his encouragement my interest in very small trains fizzled out.
About twelve years ago, being bored and living in a house with a large loft, I decided to get back into model railways. I chose 'N' gauge, built a moderate sized terminus station and then ran into various problems. It was a bad period for commercial British 'N'. Hornby-Minitrix was dead: Graham Farish had ceased production while their new owners moved production to China. The locomotives available were second-hand, crude in appearance and mechanically temperamental. Farish diesels were a nightmare of split drive gears and burnt-out motors: Minitrix steam locos proved that even the Germans make mistakes sometimes. About the only loco I had that could be relied upon was an old Peco 'Jubilee' and that wasn't exactly a branch line engine.
So I started again in 2mm finescale, and quickly found the limits of my own modelling ability. Building a steam loco chassis in such a small scale, even an inside-cylinder 0-6-0, required a level of patience and precision that I could not manage. Then I got married: all my 'N' gauge and 2mm FS bits were slung into boxes and stored away.
Until last week, when I thought I would start clearing out the old barn that I keep all my junk in. The junk includes two and a half Land Rovers, a VW Golf, an old American Dodge, a partly built kit car, about twenty boxes of books, some hopeless furniture and, right at the back, several boxes of model railway equipment. I started digging around in the boxes, and was soon finding things that I had forgotten ever buying. I thought about putting the whole lot on eBay, and then I found something else I had forgotten about. An experimental baseboard, 4' x 1', constructed of plywood. Despite eight years in damp storage it had not warped. I also turned up the fiddle yard from my old 'N' gauge layout, various unbuilt and half-built buildings, scenic materials, a box full of point motors and switches, some rather nice wagons on 2mm FS wheels, a badly-painted Union Mills 'J39' and a couple of boxes of broken loco mechanisms and bodies. Layouts have been started with a lot less.
So here is the plan: build a fairly minimalist terminus station in a space 4' x 1' (plus fiddle yard) and see if, for the first time in my life, I can get it (a) running reliably (b) scenically finished and (c) looking good enough that I would not be embarrassed to show it off in public. In achieving (a) I have a couple of things to help me. Firstly the quality of commercial 'N' is a lot better than it was a few years ago. Secondly this is by far the smallest layout I have ever built, so I should be able to pay very careful attention to getting the trackwork absolutely flat, which is three-quarters of the battle in such a small scale. Thirdly (and yet to be tested) we now have DCC control. One of the problems with 'N' gauge has always been trying to transmit tiny voltages and currents through tiny wheels with very little weight to keep them in firm contact with the track. I am hoping that DCC, with a constant 16 volt supply to the track, makes for more reliable slow running. We will see.
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