Since my gallery has been broken for a while I thought I would take my photos and this time turn them into a Blog. This is going to be a bit more of a retrospective in that all this stuff happened in the past. Since I would probably still build the layout in the same way though it might be useful to show how a layout comes together.

Coketown was to represent a Lancashire mill town with a lot of history from Victorian times but with modern railways running through it. Coketown itself is the name of the town in Hard Times which is probably based on Preston where Charles Dickens did live for a while. The Victorian railway will have been rebuilt and rebuilt over the years.

I liked the idea of big heavy viaducts and bridges and had numerous ideas about trams and branch lines but ended up with just the mainline through the town centre and an abandoned viaduct which is now repurposed as a walking and cycling route. N gauge was always going to be the chosen size to fit it into my house and be able to run decent length trains.

We go back, back, back in time to early 2005.

The layout was designed on Coreldraw and was based on some baseboards I had already built for another more permanent layout in a back bedroom. This layout was going to be a show layout and portable.

The station has loop platforms in both directions, a bay that accessible as a terminus and a bidirectional goods loop around the outside of the platforms. There is a yard which started as a container transfer area but was never going to be big enough for that and some carriage sidings.

At the beginning it was a DC layout with a lot of sections.

The Coreldraw layout was printed and cut out and stuck on card so I could get a feel of what the layout would look like.

This was important because I wanted to see what the views along the layout would be.

The centre section of the layout is elevated over a canal and road to break up the monotony of an all flat baseboard. Points were placed carefully so that point motors were not over the canal or road.