In The Beginning ...

 

... was the wood and the wood was with ... well, was with very little else to be honest!

Yes, due to the recent bad weather, together with all of the preparations for Christmas, very little work has taken place on the railway these past couple of weeks and we are beginning to get withdrawal symptoms! Mind you, the enforced break is probably a good thing since, when we do get back to work, it will be with a renewed interest and a definite keenness to make further progress.

Anyway, since there are no new updates, I thought I would turn back the clock to August 2007 and to the first photograph that I took of the project.

This, therefore, is the initial P-shaped layout that was merely going to consist of a twin track loop with a terminus plus a branch line that would start at the terminus and then rise up to travel around to the top right-hand corner of the layout.

A couple of weeks prior to this we had dragged my old train set down from the loft (stored, as it was, in two large aluminum boxes) purely to see what there was and what state it was in with a view to, possibly, selling it on eBay.

As such, we duly set it up on the floor of this room, a former playroom and, as you can imagine, this was not such a good idea since it meant that most of the fairly old track was uneven. Subsequently, we had little success in running any trains but did succeed in getting very sore knees! It was then that the notion of selling it all was being given serious consideration; at least that was until my brother in law suggested that we could run the track around the room on boards.

Well, since then we have not looked back and the railway has slowly grown and developed into what we have today - a somewhat large layout that has taken over both the entire room and our lives ... but we love it!

I go into more detail of the layout's development on my website so, for now, I just thought that it would be interesting to see how it all looked in those early and innocent days.

In those days, too, we knew very little about how to build a large layout and the techniques needed for constructing good scenery. As such this original half of the railway certainly reflects that, especially when compared to what we have done in the other half of, what we now call The Shed. In mitigation I would say that it was never supposed to become such a leviathan and it really has just developed over the previous three years into something that we would never have imagined all those months ago. As I mentioned in a previous posting, we already have plans to revisit this northern section in order to get rid of the crawl-through and, also, to make it as interesting and realistic as the southern section.

It is certainly an eye-opener for us to look back and see how it all began and it does leave us wondering if and when it will ever be finished!