Un-named OO layout in progress

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Background

This is my layout-in-progress, it's very much not finished but I have nearly got all the trackwork and wiring done. It's a modern-image UK outline layout set in East Anglia, with some possibly-cunning design ideas which make it a bit more flexible.

The New Zealand dollar fell quite a bit this year, making modelling European or US railways more expensive than before. Luckily the pound fell even more so UK is still an affordable prospect. The other motivation for this layout was seeing how good the Hornby and Bachmann class 08s were - I've always loved those, and used to watch them mooching around Sheffield station when I was a lad. I was intending to get a blue one to play with, but availability was not my friend and I picked up an EWS-liveried specimen which was the catalyst for a few more modern image purchases. It seems very odd to have moved halfway around the world only to model a period in the UK rail scene which I haven't personally experienced. We did emigrate after privatisation, but I must confess to not paying much attention to the UK scene after the blue diesels faded away...

The goal was to build something quickly to potter around with a shunter and some wagons, and it dovetailed nicely with an idea a long time ago to build a non-minimum-space Inglenook on which to run an NS class 6400 I acquired at the time. My cunning plan is to make something set in East Anglia (I lived near Ely until I was 8) which could double as part of Holland (where my wife is from) in order to run both sets of stock. With some swappable vehicles and signs, this might work OK...

The left-hand board of the two has the Inglenook and a small drain, and will have a small field in the foreground with a farm acess road. The scenery should be fairly generic, and this half can be operated on its own (possibly with a clip-on headshunt). The right-hand board adds a run around loop and a couple of sidings. This one will be more country- specific and I'm thinking at the moment of doing something inspired by Whitemoor Yard in March, where the yard was allowed to run down but has been brought back to life with some new track, some old, and modern fittings. Obviously this would be on a much smaller scale, and I didn't start with this plan in mind but came across it while looking for road overbridges in Cambridgeshire - there aren't many! I'm still not sure if I can get away with the bridge at the left-hand end but the profile boards allow for one at the moment since it's harder to stick on than cut off...

Next steps are to install the Tortoise motors on the second board, wire the umbilical for them (they're controlled by an eight-output decoder made by NCE which lives under the first board) and decide if I want an inspection pit on one of the two sidings on the second board. Then a bit of landscaping - the good bit!