What's in a name?

[Lawrence]

I have been trying to find the thread where someone was trying to come up with a layout or station names recently, I gave up

 

but I did find this http://www.behindthename.com/nmc/jap.php don't know how accurate it is but it may be of some use

[Kabutoni]

Peh, the nam of my gf isn't even in the list :/

[westfalen]

A layout we had several years ago had a river on it which our cat thought was a comfortable place to snooze so my brother called his railroad the Cat River Railroad, my father has lettered some equipment Cat Mountain. When I named my small Japanese layout a couple of years ago I carried on the theme with the Nekotani Dentetsu (Cat Valley Electric Railway) or Nekoden as the locals call it.

[Claude_Dreyfus]

The thread in question could be one for our club layouts - since christened Torii Ito. Hunting for names is always tricky, especially for a Japanese model  . As an interim project we are in the process of converting our UK outline layout to Japanese, and yet again the hunt for a name has had to take place.

 

This time I used the tried and tested method of choosing particular locale - use something like Wikipedia - and listing as many names of small towns and villages you can find. Then just choose one that sounds the best - that's how we got to Yamanouchi Oshika, two small towns in the Fuji region. Gives you planty of scope, a chance to get a reliable Japanese translation and avoids calling your layout something inadvertant; like 'You Smell' or suchlike...