It was before Stuttgart that I posted some thoughts on ’roundy-roundy’ layouts.  In the past month I have been looking at my modelling direction yet again.  I’ll explore my thoughts a little more over the next few posts – and hopfully also show that I am doing a little modelling.

To start off with, I’ve been looking at the Wisbech and Upwell tramway for ideas for a small UK shunting plank.  I blogged this bucolic backwater in a post a while back.  I modified a Model Rail design to get this plan….

Outwell village looked like this in GE/LNER days.

Playing with this plan gave me this 3′ x 1′ design.  It could have a fiddle yard at either end, but one on the right side only would allow a simple shunting plank to be developed.

This captures most of the features of Outwell in a small space.  The only change needed might be to model the rail bridge at a slightly flatter angle, to allow the line back to Wisbech to pass through the end of the board.

I have got really enthused about this, so I have ordered one of these….

I recognise that building baseboards is not my strong point, so I’ve settled for this easy option.  I could order an end board like the above for the fiddle yard, but I will bodge that from the bits of timber in the loft.

I had hoped to also include a picture of an ‘N’ gauge version of one of these:

I’ve had a lot of fun modifying a Graham Farish O4 shunter to one with the smaller cab windows and fitting some Etched Pixels tramway skirts.  This is really just a matter of taking the plunge and modifying a beautiful and expensive (even if I got it cheap) model.  Realistically, you are then paying for the fun of making something different, rather than for the original model.  Seems a fair deal to me.

It all seemed to be coming together very well, but having mated body back to chassis and taken it down to a club night for a test run, there seems to be a dead short and it wasn’t moving.  Strange, as the chassis was running fine before.  I’ll return to this over Christmas to hunt for further inspiration!

And what about the modules I was building, and indeed the roundy-roundy?  As I said, I’ll talk a little more about these over the next few posts.