Welcome!

Welcome to my new blog for my new model railway, based on Skipton Railway Station in Victoria, from 1955 to 1965. This layout is being built to HO scale, 1:87, with Peco Code 83 track. It's overall size is 5.4 x 0.6m, and is currently 1.2m tall, however there are plans to shorten the height to 1.1m. There are three baseboards, each 1.8 x 0.6m.

This is intended to be an exhibition layout, and will hopefully have it's debut sometime in the latter half of this year. As of now, the only work that has been done is the construction of the first baseboard, however the materials for the other two have also been obtained.

For my first post, I will outline what I did to plan for the layout as of now.

I started out by obtaining a track plan for Skipton. The plan I am using is from Victorianrailways.net, which is a site I highly recommend for anyone interested in the Victorian Railways and successors. The plan I used is a site plan, and can be seen here: http://www.victorianrailways.net/signaling/completedia/skipton.pdf

The track plan I made is not to scale. Due to the space I would need to do Skipton to scale, I decided to use selective compression. Unlike some other plans I have done, the plan for Skipton was not done to scale (i.e. 1:87, and then say 4/5 of the overall length, as I did with a plan for a friend of Traralgon).

I then put the plan into Anyrail, using Peco Code 83 track for the scenic section, and Peco Code 100 track for the fiddle yard. The fiddle yard will use insulfrog medium radius turnouts, and the scenic section will use electrofrog #6 turnouts. After that, I did the basic scenic parts into the plan (platform, turntable and goods shed.). The grain silos and storage areas will be added into the model at a later stage once I can obtain enough images to scratchbuild them.

The red lines denote baseboard joints, and the grid squares are 30x30cm. 

This concludes my first post. Images of the first baseboard under construction will be posted in a seperate post.

Peter