It’s interesting for me to step through the back catalogue of the images of this layouts (Shelfie2) development. The picture above was taken yesterday in natural lighting in our garden. The picture below shows the ‘concept’ I was thinking of and quite sobering that it was some three years ago…

These basic structures helped with the visualisation of the layout. Where I can I like to work full size, you get the real feel for the sight lines and physical volume of the model. One element of suggested plans both on line and in printed media, is that for the given space, the volume of the buildings and structures don’t work. This then causes issues with things like road width and street corner radii, where the bus that’s on the model would need a three point turn to get around a bend in the road! Obviously in the quaint towns, villages and cities of the UK there’s locations where restricted streets are very real, but not as frequent as they would appear to be on some layouts!

This is the far side view of the layout under construction. This view is actually the better side with this landscape and track configuration. What Shelfie2 has taught me this week, is that I should have moved the entire track bed to a different angle, and an inch or two closer to the viewer in the above image.

This is the viewpoint that works best, at this time I was using manual couplings, so a forward tree line wasn’t very practical.

After deciding the final orientation of the layout filling in the blanks as far as the scenics go was quite straightforward if a little drawn out time wise. The core of the woodland is still based on Woodland Scenics large tree armatures and the scenic break bridge is a scratch built model by Geoff Taylor.

A thought occurred whilst taking this set of images under natural lighting. Simply that with the Dingham auto couplings and a slightly revised track orientation, the surrounding woodland presentation had potential to have been much bolder. And using increased physical volume, far more intrusive into the scene, in a good way.

Food for thought with the next one….