Page 121: December 2016

November 30, 2016 by Gert

Not so many scrapbook updates this year, but here is the last one, with a lot of pictures! 🙂

Zwei Kreise Irgendwo in Preußen (Two circles somewhere in Prussia) – by Thomas from Cologne, Germany

It is an N scale layout designed to showcase those special edition Fleischmann or Arnold or Minitrix trainsets form „Epoch 1“ – the time just after the first World War, prior to about 1923, when the old states in Germany still had their own railway administrations.

Size is almost exactly 50×50 cm. It’s basically a double pizza with Fleischmann Piccolo track. The whole layout including base, platform at the station, and landscape is entirely made from styrofoam. The layout was finished in about a week. The few buildings I bought used at a local model railroading dealer, first it saved some time, second it was actually cheaper than getting building kits. The trees I made from a set that included raw materials and spray glue. No fancy stuff anywhere …

Of course it’s easy to change the era of the layout by just placing one or two cars and different trains 😉

I am very much into landscaping and especially I love the atmosphere of tracks that run through forest. The layout serves as a „winter“ layout … we even put it next to the christmas tree last year … but I tried to make it more more like autumn, with the warm seasonal colors.

I will hopefully do another layout this winter, that follows the same idea and subject, but will get a bit more landscape details and probably  offer space for three trains altogether …

SONACAL – by Geoffrey Nickson

Complete! After more than 7 years of work, the SONACAL micro-layout (see pages 78, 90 and 114 of the Scrapbook) can now be considered as very largely completed. Some finer weathering is still required, as well as super-detailing here and there.

It’s been a long time, but a highly instructive one also. I am extremely grateful to the late Carl, to yourself and to the website for helping me overcome my notorious “scenic block”. At age 63+, I have actually built a layout…wow, talk of late bloomers!

And as an added bonus, the layout has been featured in the October 2016 issue of the French railway modelling monthly Loco-Revue, with some fine shots by the Editor, Yann Baude! I attach one such shot, kindly credit it to Yann.

My self-confidence has been boosted no end, so much so that I have now tackled a far more ambitious project, namely a point-to-point shelf layout around part of my bedroom, with SONACAL as one of the points. And as retirement has now happened, I have high hopes for this new project!

Schozach (H0e) – by Philipp Brune from Neu-Ulm, Germany

I am a model railroader since my childhood times and I wanted to have a small layout in our living room. Last year, my wife and I found a nice miniature glasshouse at IKEA, originally intended to house some pot plants. Its size is about 44 x 22 cm, so it nicely fits on a window shelf. I decided to use it to contain my first micro layout. Inside there is space for a layout of about 40 x 20 cm size. I wanted to demonstrate that a „real“ model railway with all its typical ingredients fits into this tiny space of 40 x 20 cm. It should have a nice, romantic landscape (preferably with a tunnel), a station with switching possibilities and a meaningful concept for realistic operation.

Since I have a larger H0/H0e layout in our basement, I decided to stay with H0 scale and build a H0e narrow gauge railway. As the prototype, I chose the narrow gauge railways of my home region, the state of Baden-Württemberg in southern Germany. In the 19th century, the royal state railways of Baden-Württemberg built four narrow gauge lines with 750mm gauge. In 1918 they were took over by the German national railway. While three of them were shut down in the 1960s due to economic reasons, one remained operational up to today as a heritage railway (see http://oechsle-bahn.de), where many of the historical rolling stock of these railways can still be seen in action during the summer period. 750 mm gauge scales down to 9mm gauge in H0 (H0e), and nice H0e models of these railways are available from company called BEMO, which I use for the project (i.e. the V51 series diesel loco).

The track plan is basically similar to Emrys Hopkins „Juster Yard“ layout as shown on www.carendt.com (thus, a back-to-back inglenook type), using a double-slip switch at the center. One leg is partially hidden in the tunnel to represent „the rest of the world“. I used Lilliput and Tillig H0e track and a Minitrix (N-scale) double slip switch. The layout is operated digitally using the NMRA DCC protocol. I call it „Schozach“, named after an existing prototype station at one of the former 750mm gauge lines, which at least resembles the station building I used in size and style.

The Baseboard size is only 40 x 20 cm!

El Dorito – by Caleb

Hello! My name is Caleb and I’ve been a reader of your small layout blog for about six of seven years.

Today I’m going to give you a little tour of my small layout, Caleb’s El Dorito. You can probably tell where I got my inspiration for the name and design 😉

Scale of my project: Gn15, however, here are no humans or animals to compare things to, so they could be any variety of sizes in the real world.

Baseboard size of your project:  twelve inches by about six or seven inches. The layout was originally built on a ruler, but it’s gotten wider with age.

Webpage: I don’t really have one, but I made a video about it on my youtube channel: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dCFieoa0lP0

I started Caleb’s El Dorito about five years ago in and around one of my Small Layout Scrapbook binges. It ended up being so much fun that I’ve been changing and adding onto it for the past five years. The concept of the layout is simple: A mine cart is hauled – by hand or motor power – up a small incline into a wooden entrance built around an imaginary mine. In the mine it’s sometimes loaded by the operator with candy for small watchers, then it’s lowered out of the mine and back down the track.

The layout is so small that I can work in all sorts of quirky details as seen in the video above.

The back of the layout serves as a bulletin board, showcasing details that have since been removed from the layout. I used to have a motor in the bottom right, but the space now houses the operator’s hand. To the left of that you can see in the inside of the mine and the hatch through which the car can be loaded.

N-Scale Inglenook – by Edward Paijmans from the Netherlands

This layout was inspired by browsing through the Carendt web site. I liked the idea of an inglenook layout and making one in N-scale was the most feasable at the time.
All buildings are from paper. Its a collection from several websites.
For shunting I made some de-couplers from old LIMA electric points but those do not work very satisfactory. So I will either convert them to micro servo operated or manual operated. All-in-all, the cost of this layout is very low. I really liked to build the layout, and the shunting posibilities are great.

More info can be found on Edwards website.