It’s been a while since the last post on this blog, and a few things have happened in the meantime. Life sometimes gets in the way of posting, so this post will go into a bit of detail on several of the developments that happened over the past month or three.
We spent a few weeks putting together the first few model buildings that will be on our layout. On one weekend weekend, we took some time to position things, see what it would look like, and plan the rest of the buildings and landscape features. To a degree at least.
We knew for some time roughly what features the layout would have. The bottom loop is going to be a bit of a ‘guesthouse by the lake’ setting. The top section will be a small town, featuring the town hall we inherited, as well as a number of residential houses, a church and a school. It will be flanked by two train stops on both straights, which for the size of the layout is, admittedly, a bit overkill, but we decided to roll with it anyway. At some point, as the automation phase progresses, the plan is to have trains stop at both stops, as well as go back and forth between the town and the guesthouse at the lake.
It’s going to take us a while to buy and asemble all the model kits for the buildings we want on the layout. But we wanted to get at least an idea how the space the buildings would take up, and how we could position them without making things look overly cramped. So we put together a list of the model kits we liked, got their footprint dimensions from the respective websites, and cut out cardboard pieces with those dimensions. Arranging those gave us a reasonable idea of how things would fit. Of course, building height is still a thing, but we’ll cross that bridge when we get there.
Planning via scribble on the printed track plan… 
… and via cardboard cutouts on the table
With a definitive list of buildings for the layout in hand, it’s now a matter of getting all of them over time, and assembling them. So far this has been good fun, aided by appropriate tools, the absence of which can lead to rather big frustration. But it will be a slow process, since budget limitations are present. In the meantime, we have also started landscaping parts of the layout.
Among all the options there are for landscaping these days, we decided to go with the basics and lay down structured mats first. So far this has happened in the lower loop, which has been covered with a grass mat, as well as the yard, which received a more gravelly treatment. A bit more detail work – flocking, trees or paths – will happen over time. Every time we start a new thing on this layout, we learn something along with it.
The guesthouse by the lake… 
And some trees that were added later. The tunnel won’t be a permanent feature. 
The yard has been covered with a gravel mat. 
Collecting the excess from the gravel mat has proved handy, since this can be used to cover up cuts or joins.