Japan meets the American Midwest on my T-TRAK thingamijig

August 18

With a small house and a young family, the one thing I don't have is space for a permanent layout, at least, not an oval where the trains can go around and around! So, while I'd satisfied myself with building a small (British Railways-themed) 'shunting plank' a year or two back, that didn't quite scratch the itch when it came to playing trains.

What I did have space for was a few shelves. I wondered if the T-TRAK way would give me scope for some sort of scenic modelling while also being easy to tidy up and store between operating sessions. On top of that, I'd started to accumulate a bunch of American and Japanese trains. I'd lived in Nebraska almost 20 years, so the Kato 'Silver Streak' set was a must-have model for me, and from there a few other (mostly) CB&Q trains got added to the mix. At the same time, after picking up a Tomix DD51 loco and being impressed by its quality and value, some Japanese trains had somehow made their way into my home.

The solution, for me at least, was to create an oval layout using two 90-cm straight sections and four 30-cm corners. One 'half' of the oval would be loosely based on the Burlington while the other 'half' would be Japanese in some sort of way (Photo 1). The American section is a mix of kits, kit-bashes, and scratch-builds (Photos 2, 3, and 4). While I'm not a terribly good scratch-builder, I do want to get better at this. The shotgun house and tin-roof church are among thel scratch-builds, while the depot is a kit-bash using (of all things!) a Peco two-storey house that isn't a billion miles off the sort of thing the CB&Q built. Although my stock is mostly from the 1940s to 50s, I wanted to give the village something off an early 20th century feel, so there's a lot of wood, unpaved roads, and so on.

As the track curves around the back of the church (Photo 5) passengers will soon find themselves on the other side of the Pacific Ocean. This side is entirely built up with kits of various kinds including the Tomix apartment block (Photo 6) which I think scrubs up really nicely with a bit of weathering; a Sankei paper kit noodle shop (Photo 7); and several of the Greenmax houses (Photo 8).

Although the American side is largely done, the Japanese side is still some ways off. It needs fences, signals, ballasting in places, plus some landscaping where the tunnel merges with the greenery. But the layout works, and takes about 5 minutes to assemble and wire up to the controller.

The flatness of the T-TRAK standard and the small size of the modules has placed some limitations on what I can do, but on the other hand, this has been a really effective way to create something more realistic than a Unitrack train set on the table while still being easy to pack away between operating sessions.

Cheers, Neale