This OO gauge layout started life as my son's tail chasing oval with a station and a few sidings. After a while I gave him some of my old Triang rolling stock which resulted in the storage sidings being so full that shunting became very difficult. It was time to extend the layout to a fiddle yard. I took the opportunity to make the line to the fiddle yard drop down a couple of inches so that I could have a slope up to a small branch station laid over the top. This branch station is what I considered to be 'my' railway. Details of this are shown in the 'Branch Line' section.

After a few years Steven lost interest and so I have now taken over the whole baseboard. The old tailchaser has been scrapped. Details of what it used to look like are in the 'Old Layout' section. Its replacement is now under construction and a record of its progress will be displayed in the 'Main Line' section

The Construction section contains details of the railway room and baseboard construction.

The Electronics section gives details of the electronic circuits used on the layout and a couple of other circuits that may be of general use.

The Rolling Stock section contains details of all the items of rolling stock I have made so far and details of the types of couplings that I have started using.

The painting section contains details of the techniques I use for painting the various models.

The layout is very much a long term project. Work has spread over about 9 years, but I do spend time on other hobbies in between. See the Eldar and Ork Warhammer armies in Steven's section for some of my other work.

I am not a rivet counter but I do like things to look true. I would much rather leave a small detail off than fit something that is oversize or clumsy because it cannot be made fine enough the be the correct scale. I feel a badly fitted bit of detail sticks out like a sore thumb whereas it hardly notices if it is missing.

I have mixed feelings about installing DCC on the layout. For control of the trains it would be great and I light all the buildings so it would be great to light the coaches. I only have two controllers and cab control allows either of them to run a train anywhere but it has resulted in having quite a few sections that can be isolated. For the control of the points and signals I am not so sure. I know it is possible to control everything with accessory decoders and to set up routes, but I have planned my control panel to have a row of switches and a diagram a bit like a real signal box and so I only need to flick a single switch to throw a point or signal instead of having to select the accessory decoder address which probably takes several button presses to throw a point. For the fiddle yard I have built route selection with a diode array. I know it is more flexible to do it in 'software' but I enjoy making the electronics and I will not change it for a while.

Another reason for not going the DCC route is cost. I very rarely run the trains, I prefer building things and so it would be a large outlay for something that would not be used. Better to spend the money on more models or tools for building them.