My Layout

Today's small but surprisingly time-consuming task was to install the dummy manual point levers Tomix provide with their points.

I went to the trouble of painting the lower half of the "indicator disc" (for want of a better word) white, as that seems prototypical. See e.g. this picture (from this page showing DD13 allocations).

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I've been working on this layout in various forms for the last 5 years or so, and it seems to be taking an awful long time. Mind you, my free time has been quite limited due to work and domestic reasons, and it probably doesn't help that I've changed the design quite a bit as I go along. It occurred to me recently that it would be nice to look back and see how far things have come in 2019, so we'll start off with this piece of under construction embankment from January of that year:

A couple of weeks later it looked like this:

Following a change of plan, the embankment has since been moved 180 degrees around the layout (it's in the background of the picture in this recent post, with the above bridge just visible on the far left). Meanwhile, the lower level station was looking like this:

but has since also been relocated. Originally I wanted a wide-ish road with a tram line running down the middle (visible on the left), but that left very little space on the other side (right hand side as seen here) of the station for any kind of "town". The tramline has been relocated so it runs off to the right through the built-up area, and the station shifted to the left.

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Some minor modifications around the rear of the train depot.

Locomotive is a MicroAce 9600 class.

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Following the earlier post, a couple of impressions of the current state:

Obviously quite a few things still to do, but the general area is starting to look reasonably complete.

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Concentrating on the rear of the train depot area at the moment, where it borders on a section of road and the lower-level loop.

The depot area is 5mm higher than the base scenery level, which is not a huge amount but enough to convey a subtle change in elevation and avoid the "flat baseboard" effect. It also helps give the impression that the lower-level loop beyond the crossing is in a shallow cutting.

Next steps are to fill in the gaps in the train depot ballast, finish off the transformer mast (the brown structure behind the truck with the square grey body) and add some detailing to that area.

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Currently mainly working on the depot area, which consists of five storage sidings and a short headshunt-style spur which will serve as a diesel fuelling point.

The sheds consist of a pair of Tomix train sheds intended for longer units, and a Tomytec single unit wooden shed, which doesn't look too incongruous next to the modern Tomix ones.

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As previously mentioned I'm creating a station which is inspired by Berlin's Stadtbahn, and was wondering what models might already have been made of it.

The first obvious candidate is the layout at the former LOXX Berlin, which is centred around a somewhat compressed version of the Stadtbahn roughly between Zoo and Ostkreuz (which is happily captured in its original form). Some pictures in my Flickr album.

Also in Berlin is a model of the Stadtbahn between Marx-Engels-Platz and the former East Berlin Haupthbahnhof (now the Ostbahnhof), which pays particular attention to the tram system (YouTube video of this layout).

A model shop in Weilheim (Upper Bavaria) presented these pictures of a customer's layout (shop sadly now closed and site unavailable, some pages in the Wayback Machine).

A German forum thread with some scratch-built structures: https://www.stummiforum.de/viewtopic.php?t=123403

And from the UK there's this blog with another (evidently never completed) take on the Stadtbahn, and this club layout under active development.

A British-built layout as a freelance depiction of part of Alexanderplatz Station and the Stadtbahn to the west of it: Youtube video (1); Youtube video (2).

Any other links or suggestions welcome.

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I lived in Berlin for many years, and spend an awful lot of time near or passing through the station now known as "Hackescher Markt". It's one of a string of stations on Berlin's Stadtbahn, a 4-track brick-built viaduct running roughtly east-west through the city centre and was originally constructed as part of a scheme to link some of the terminus stations which had been built haphazardly by various private companies during the mid 19th century.

Originally I wasn't planning to do anything particularly German on my proposed layout, but a chance acquisition of some second-hand Faller viaduct sections during a visit to Berlin a while back got me thinking, and I realised I could sneak in a little viaduct station vaguely inspired by the Stadtbahn. The choice fell on Hackescher Markt because I'm familiar with it, moreover it has tramlines around it and I want trams on my layout anyway. However it won't be anything as grand as a proper model of the station - for a start there'll only be two tracks, not the two S-Bahn and 2 Fernbahn ones of the real version. The viaducts will be the relatively plain Faller ones, nothing like as fancy as the prototype, and I won't be attempting to model the rather handsome station hall either (partly as I want to actually see the trains and the layout behind the station).

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A short video of the layout in its current state of construction from a driver's point-of-view.

久しぶり車載カメラでレイアウトを撮影してみました。まだまだ建設現場みたいな感じですが、何となく進んでいる気がします。

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