This year may have been thin on posts on here, however that doesn’t mean that nothing has been happening. Well not completely nothing anyway, but time has been busy and so some things have happened but I’ve not had time to write about them.

Probably the most major thing to happen this year was the arrival of a second model railway in the house. My son reached an age this year that we offered him his own railway in his bedroom since he enjoyed coming up into the loft to see Daddy’s railway.

This railway is designed to be able to be dismantled and put away as we need the space when Grandparents come and visit. It was also a much simpler build due to the need to hit a deadline and it not being clear how much it will be played with. So it uses some of the Hornby fixed track that I’ve accumulated over the years with train sets as well as their controllers.

The track layout is designed to be built in a couple of phases – the first was for the birthday earlier this year and the second may possibly appear as a result of a present in the next week. However this meant doing all the design work up front in order to make sure the baseboard was correct and suitable dead ends where left that could be extended.

The initial phase is just for a simple loop with siding, using a single controller with power switched via the set of points. This last feature has turned out to be an issue since the Hornby points occasionally short when being switched. So I think the phase 2 build is probably going to have to swap those out.

The second phase turns the sliding into a complete loop and will also add a couple of new sidings to be a small good yard. The initial thinking was that the goods yard could possibly be a third phase, but in the end it’s going to be part of the second phase as it’s not much additional new track.

The base board is straight-forward 12mm MDF with 2×1 framing. Since it sits in the corner of the room then a cut out in the middle makes it easier to deal with any derailments in the corner as well as allowing access to the shelves above. The whole thing sits on an existing set of Ikea shelves along with two removable legs at the front. So it can be packed away to a flat baseboard when needed.

So lets have some photos of the baseboard under construction, through painting and track laying into final position ready to go: