RAIL PHOTOPRINTS

This 3D concept, from my book Micro Layouts, encapsulates the idea of an intense shunting layout with low-level foreground yard and wagon turntable, a rear yard – glimpsed through the ‘Ferodo’ bridge – and upper level warehouse, extreme left. The whole lot is contained within a space of 4ft by 1ft 10in and shows what can be achieved in such a small space. Now, I don’t want to replicate this design here, but to show the concept of a double-height layout and a high-level diagonal spine, which can be transferred to the new designs that follow.

This article was partly inspired by John McKenzie, a Model Rail reader who had been searching for an optimum end-to-end shunting layout but had struggled to find a solution.

The Model Rail team has received many similar requests for help over the years and, as a result, I’ve been charged with coming to the rescue.

There’s a stereotype of shunting layouts. They’re often an Inglenook or something a tad bigger although, in more recent times, they’ve become synonymous with micro layouts. While many of these have been outstanding, most of us have tended to focus our efforts on very small designs. Certainly,

when I think of published articles, large shunting layouts are obvious by their absence and, although I covered marshalling yards in a not-so-long-ago issue of Model Rail, I’d hoped that modellers might take up the gauntlet and venture beyond the constraints of our current thinking and practice.

That said, I wonder if, like me, it’s easy to feel overawed by bigger sizes, especially if we’re going to stay away from more glamorous passenger services, lengthy trains, high speed and the like. I know I’d always prefer something industrial and generally downtrodden over a pristine main line racetrack any day. Am I alone in this, or are there others who have a similar hankering? And are we all thinking that an 8ft by 3ft layout in ‘OO’ is an absolute dream that cries out for the most adventurous of schemes?

Working on the principle that pretty much everything published, or built in recent times, hasn’t impressed our reader, means that whatever I come up with has to be quite different, not just for the sake of difference, but because it’s both operationally and visually enticing. I suspect, judging by size, that shunting on multiple sites around the layout rather than one large one is going to create more interest. So I’m going to start by constructing a design brief with the two things we know – size and purpose – and guess the rest!