Why the Enoden?
Like a lot of English children, I had a Hornby OO Gauge train set in my formative years and I'm sure it left something of an impression. It grew (with the help of my father - I must only have been six or seven at the time) into what I remember as a large layout with a British Rail HST and other modern-outline stock controlled by the Hornby Zero-1, an early proprietary DCC system.
As far as I remember, the OO layout bit the dust when we moved to Sheffield when I was eight. There followed a train-free period, then a dalliance with British and American outline N-gauge in my early teens which resulted in a couple of half-layouts and one very small portable one which I finished and sold on to a friend.
There followed another, longer period of train-free-ness, although I did build the large scale Lego Shay you see here. It's quite appealing in that scale because there was enough room to have working motion and driveshaft, although the cardan shafts are sadly absent.
You can see more pictures here. At some point I'll try and make some log bunks to go with it for running in the garden.
The catalyst for the latest venture was a holiday to Munich, where I had a lovely time wandering around the model shops. Every department store and toyshop appeared to carry a huge range from most of the major German manufacturers, a complete contrast to the UK and frankly pretty much everywhere else. Model trains are clearly big in Germany. The prices are much better too, which was why I came back with quite a large Märklin Z gauge start set, a station building and some extra carriages. I quietly collected a few more bits and bobs before we emigrated.
I have to say that Micky was delighted by all this, partly because she's quite keen on the idea of making trees, and partly because the ratio of disposable income to volume of stuff filling up the house is much lower with Märklin than with, say, Lego or DVDs.
I'm getting to the point soon, please bear with me.
When we arrived in NZ, it seemed like it wasn't possible to buy the Z-gauge trains or track anywhere (although I have since found an importer in Auckland and my dad found a place in Dunedin) so a layout seemed quite a remote chance until we had a trip back to Europe to stock up. I was also a bit nervous about setting to with the very small and expensive Märklin stock and track after years of forgetting how to use fishplates and which way around diodes go.
When I spotted a Kato N-gauge model of a four-wheel Hiroshima tram in the fabulous Hobby City in Auckland for about the price of three DVDs, I bought it. It's a fine model, and I thought I could build a T-Trak module for it. T-Trak is a modular layout system devised in Japan for small spaces, and aimed mainly at tram modellers. The modules are the same size as a sheet of A4 paper and use clip together track pieces to join them. Because the modules are small, they can be built quickly with few tools, and finished to a high standard. All very clever, and you can see how this would be a nice easy start and somewhere to put my solitary tram.
Fast-forward a few months, and I've just about completed more than eighteen square feet of baseboard to run this one-and-a-half-inch tram on. So what went wrong?
The short answer is the Enoden. While looking for pictures of urban Japan in general, and Hiroden trams in particular, I came across Doug Coster's Setagaya tram layout. One of the other pages on his website mentioned a new layout which would feature the Enoden. I'd also seen some photographs of this distinctive green-and-cream light rail rolling-stock...
I don't think I took much notice at the time, since I was looking for Hiroden information, but something must have lodged, because over the last few months my small tramway plan has grown somewhat. Rather than a caricature of a tramway in a small space, I'm hoping to make something which is a bit closer to reality. While I can't fit 10km of trackage onto my baseboard, I can replicate parts of the track plan quite accurately and use selective compression to fit in some of the interesting features of the line.