No prizes for guessing where I am definitely not! The shed was already 85 degrees when I opened the door at 8am. Some of us spend all winter dreaming of hot sunny days, then when it arrives, it's the wrong kind haha....
I was looking back at my early layout beginnings and was surprised to see that by 2009 I had already established a few basic norms. Like I D Backscenes, gluing & ballasting track in one go, Hornby drystone walls, Ratio fencing, and bullhead track (SMP) married to Peco Code 75 points. This was after a false start with Peco Code 100.
The big mistake was building a busy multi-track Diggle Junction. The bullhead track with a mineral wagon on it had been ballasted using the eye-dropper method and was a complete pudding. The three tracks on the right were glued and ballasted in one go. I was learning....
In short, the layout was too complex and too wide. It never got beyond the shed wall, which was a good job seeing as there was no room on the window wall for a fiddle yard. The baseboards were built with a curving slope as at the real Diggle Junction, but free-rolling wagons would not stay in the sidings...
Amongst my locos was a Fowler 7F 0-8-0,
so typical of the Standedge line before the Austerity 2-8-0's took over in 1957. After this, I went in the opposite direction and built Moorgate Halt, a simple wooden platform affair about a mile west of Diggle and ended up building Delph. After that, it was a case of
small layouts rule.....
