Secrets of the Railway Cupboard Part 2 - The Big Secret!

Two months ago I let readers of the blog into my railway cupboard, which quite frankly, despite all my hard work painting it, looked more than a little untidy once refilled.  However, two months ago now seems like a very long time ago... Life has changed.

A fortnight ago my wife announced that there will be a new arrival in the Peake household in the first quarter of 2012 (and no, not from Hornby).  Yes, we are expecting a baby!  Due to this there has to be a major re-organisation of our "living quarters" and the original, mark 1 plans for a railway room/study have been dusted off, typex applied and 'Nursery' added instead.  Of course this has a major impact on my intended scheme for an alcove based desk and possible test track above.  Indeed, the alcove itself will be no more as the chimney breast will have give way to make more space in the bedroom.

And it will be a bedroom only, no space really for model trains.  Or will there...?

Plans are afoot to re-organise the Railway Cupboard to provide some additional shelving (white) and a built-in but lift-out workbench (yellow).  Granted, there will have to be some ruthless clearing out of the "someday and maybe" projects, and all those things on the shelves that shouldn't be will have to go elsewhere, but there is a chance it could work.  Things have to change whatever happens, time and pennies will be in short supply in the months/years to come so a carefully planned approach is required.  I'm still working on that...

Further Deformation or Diluted Essence?

Last weekend I outlined how several months ago I had considered rebuilding Shifting Sands to fit into the railway room I then had planned, essentially elongating the layout into something that ran along two of the walls.  The drastic cutting of the baseboard was also given some thought in a second version which really would have put a new perspective on things.  Back to those 'lines of indecision':

White lines - existing edges and centre; blue line - existing backscene base; red and orange lines - proposed new baseboard edges.

Yet again the back of the layout and the ice cream parlour would be lost, but the twist would have been that the baseboard would be turned through 180 degrees to make the shaped edge the front of the layout.  A new backscene along the present front would have depicted a holiday park, and the sea would have been visible beyond the dunes, which would be to the left of the revised layout.  Again the running line would have been straightened out into the longer run.  Sadly there isn't a composite sketch to show you this time as I didn't have the right view to make one from and couldn't take one as the layout is on display at 'Rails to the Sands' in Cleethorpes.  I thought I had made a trackplan sketch but can't seem to locate one...

My main concern with this scene was that the layout was built to be viewed from one direction, turning it around would destroy this. Although I was open to the possibilities created there would need to be some work to change things, I was especially concerned about the platform fence blocking the view of trains in the station, however realistic this might be!

Eventually this image did make another idea form in my mind.  My new workbench looks set to be located in an alcove just over 3' wide by 1' deep.  The area over the workbench will be ripe for shelving that could possibly hold a micro layout.  Now 3' isn't that long a run for a miniature railway, even in O9, but what if I added a fiddle yard around the corner when in use?  Could the head shunt be on a similar bolt-on board?

Essence of 'Shifting Sands'?

The kick-back from the fiddle yard (on the right) would be to allow handling free operation and exchange of locos, something I wish I had incorporated on the original 'Shifting Sands'.  Well it worked on paper, admittedly a scale-less sketch, but would it really work.... as with the development of 'Shifting Sands', I turned to my test track to mock-up what might be possible:

White lines - fixed baseboard edges; yellow lines - bolt-on boards

It is certainly feasible, but there would be issues with uncoupling on a 10" radius curve using MicroTrains couplers and the same issues I have on 'Shifting Sands' coupling back up after running around.  It was also rather too close to the original layout in many ways, and risked moving from diluted essence to poor pastiche. As any over-the-workbench scheme would essentially be a home-use test track, I asked myself could I get away with even less?  Is a loop a real necessity if a loco-swap was an alternative?  I doodled again:

Simplified over-workbench test track.

I have cunningly disguised the lack of a full loop by making it look like there is one, but as it crosses a road or pathway there is a gate across the far end.  It is a busy day and rather than run around, locos are simply swapped over.  Something similar used to exist at Lakeside station on the Cleethorpes Coast Light Railway and sometimes was operated in that way:

The Cleethorpes Gate in 1995, with 'Little Giant' and 'King George V'.

The eagle eyed will notice that the ice cream van makes yet another appearance in the triangle of land between the station and fiddle yard kick-back on the plan.  I have no objection on this test track scheme to the kick-back being at least partially visible in the scenic area

This set-up, if built, could easily represent the other end of the Somerthorpe Miniature Railway, the much fabled 'Somerthorpe Promenade'.  Alternatively, I could really shake things up and set it in a town park, farm park, stately home or abandoned standard gauge trackbed.  OK, perhaps not that last one in that space....

The Deformation of Shifting Sands?

This is the first of at least a few posts where I hope to update readers of the current progress of railway related issues chez Peake, from the practicalities of railway modelling in the family home to dealing with ongoing building and decorating work.  Plus, some of my present random thoughts on layout design may be included.

As many readers may know, we are presently having a lot of work done on the house (or doing it ourselves) and this has caused railway modelling to fall to the wayside for both practical and time reasons.  Practical in that a lot of things have to be moved around and stored in places they wouldn't usually be found, and time wise... well someone has to do the painting and other work!

One thing I had hoped to gain through the various works underway was a proper 'railway room' of my own.  My workbench has sat in the corner of the bedroom for several years and a separate work area and layout building space was planned.  This would have been created by splitting the bedroom in two with a new (very short) corridor serving the new rooms:

Railway room ('Study') to the right.

Alas, several factors have seen that this won't be happening.  Firstly, the railway room got smaller as the plans went on, it would have been 5' 6" x 7' 3" in the final version, as to cut the costs I had decided to retain the chimney breast in the main room, hence needed more space in there.  This would really have left the railway room too small to be practical, despite the attractive 7' 3" wall to build a layout against.  There was a factor here as 'Shifting Sands' is 2' deep and needs operating space around it at home.  It just wouldn't have fit.  But what if it could have been straightened out and incorporated into a home layout?

Shifting Sands extended (to fit 7' 6" x 6' 6" room) - lower sketch is later thinking.

At 18" wide this would have still intruded into the room some way, the lower sketch shows how the board could have been tapered to be less intrusive.  Cutting up the layout in this way would have been tricky to say the least but I pushed on with the thinking, drawing up this illustration to prove to myself it was possible, I saved this as the 'lines of indecision'!:

White lines - existing edges and centre; blue line - existing backscene base; red lines - new baseboard edges.

Finally I had an artistic moment and created a composite image or how the layout could look with the backscene moved and the line straightened off, I think I might have left the old line crossing the road in typical re-aligned miniature railway fashion.  The ice cream parlour is replaced by an Oxford Diecast ice cream van, so no worries about the supply of the cold stuff on those blustery Lincolnshire days...:

What might have been - the deformation of Shifting Sands.

Fans of 'Shifting Sands' will be pleased to hear that this isn't happening, indeed, despite other ideas to rebuild the layout (of which more anon.) I think things will remain as they are on the layout's return home, sometimes a concept works best first time and subsequent tinkering can dilute and ruin a layout's design and impact.

The main reason the railway room won't be happening is slippage in the renovation budget.  A couple of other jobs have come in over and above what I had predicted (hoped) they would and this has led to me to reconsider this project, despite some additional funding being available from the 'modelling fund'.  However, plans are afoot to create a new, custom work area once redecoration is complete, and in the mean time I have made some progress elsewhere which improves life for the little folk.  More next time....