At Christmas, after a well-placed hint, I received a Scale Model Scenery baseboard kit designed to fit into a 'Really Useful' wrapping paper box. The intention is to produce something that can (hopefully) live in and be operated in the house. possibly as a 'desk sitter', although clearances may be on the tight side for that ambition. I haven't built the board yet but marked out the space (730 x 207mm) on some Amazon packing paper and played about with point templates, various rulers and a bit of post-production to run through a few options.
The obvious one is an inglenook, a "standard" 5-3-3 seems possible but the second version is more a 4-4-2 with a shorter headshunt, the idea being that the rearward longer siding could have a rough platform to receive a simplex and a couple of 4w coaches from a fiddle stick run-off connected top-right.
The next option is to go for two points facing each other, along the lines of my earlier desktop-sitter 'Upcycle', again a passenger operation ought to be possible to the rear right hand line using a fiddle stick connected top-left.
It's not too far from there to what to me is a very familiar plan adding another point... I have described this as 'Tragbar' as it is a mirror of an arrangement popularised in Scale Model Trains by the late Chris Ellis building the build of a layout of that name. It is more familiar to me as my Dad and I built a layout to this plan many years earlier called 'Chetley'. We hid the line top-right as a fiddle yard on the board but again this idea uses an optional fiddle stick.
Next is a version of the plan I was previously looking at on the small cork board, a loop and siding. Whilst all of these plans benefit from a fiddle stick, this one requires it for full operation. However it would be possible to shunt it as a tuning fork without it for a quick operating session.
The final plan is actually a return to the Inglenook theme and has been created more recently than the other images. This switches the fiddle-stick line to the longer siding and the headshunt is a dead end. In some ways I prefer that as it creates a real restriction to the length rather than the possibility of cheating off down a fiddle stick!
To fit in the box the board doesn't actually have much height to the backscene boards, 95mm - so buildings are something that have to be considered carefully. We are in the territory of huts, grounded van bodies and high walls. I envisage the line at the back running behind a wall, that get's higher and then has a lean-to over the middle line. Some shrubbery behind the back line would make it's disappearance complete as it wraps over the hole in the sky...
More soon...
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