Inspirations

This post is a bit later than originally intended. Apparently it was my WordPress 1 month birthday recently. I’m not going to throw a party…

I don’t know about you, but I find life tends to get in the way of modelling, you know, all the boring stuff – like work, sleeping, eating, travelling to work and so on. I find that sometimes I need inspiration, or possibly a distraction of some sort, to send me back to the modelling table.

Just such inspiration struck yesterday. I am a regular visitor to a meeting, held roughly once every 6 weeks, by a local 009 Group. Despite the name, it is not exclusively 4mm scale on 9mm track, it is more a loose association of like minded modellers and railway enthusiasts, not all of whom actually model 009. One of the displays there yesterday by was by a friend of mine from the 5.5mm Association showing a modular layout concept he and a couple of others are developing.

I have always shied away from modular layouts in the past, the results are often toylike and sudden changes in scenery from western desert to florida swampland in a matter of inches, always jars for me. However, this new concept uses readily available baseboard kits, standard 6 inch ‘connecting links’ which are painted black, standard electrical connectors and Peco track (alright it’s 0-16.5 track, but who’s counting?) and apart from the obvious requirement that the track has to be a certain distance from the front of the board, everything else is pretty much up to the builder.

Since my interest in narrow gauge tends towards the larger 3′ gauge prototypes (Ireland, Isle of Man etc), the chance of me ever having enough space to model proper length trains in my own house are remote, but by contibuting a couple of 900mm long modules, my longer trains can run whenever the modular layout is set up at an exhibition.

All the above was the inspiration for me to dig out my 5.5mm scale models and start working on a few wagons for the next meeting, which will be at Narrow Gauge North in Leeds on 9th March.

Just to prove it exists, here’s a picture of my workbench.