My Layout so far

[Sean]

Blobby - thanks! The main section where the station is located is only 75 cm deep. That is barely enough, when I get the new baseboard I plan to have it 100 cm deep.

 

Todd - good question! It seems a lot of them in Japan are, which is really good for those of us doing urban N guage layouts!

 

JR 500 - thanks! :)

[Blobby]

Blobby - thanks! The main section where the station is located is only 75 cm deep. That is barely enough, when I get the new baseboard I plan to have it 100 cm deep.

 

Todd - good question! It seems a lot of them in Japan are, which is really good for those of us doing urban N guage layouts!

 

JR 500 - thanks! :)

 

Thanx

[Sean]

Its been a while but after a 6+ year hiatus, as of this week my model railroad layout is back!

 

Back in 2016 when my son was just 2 years old we moved and I ended up packing my layout up.  It has sat in storage ever since.  In the intervening years, my son grew up into an 8 year old and we added a little sister for him who is now almost 5.  I was 8 years old myself when my dad bought me my first N-gauge railroad, so I decided this would be the year that I introduced them to it.  

 

So about a week ago a nice 180 by 90cm base board arrived at our house and I took the boxes out and basically just started unpacking model buildings, trains and track.  This was met with extreme bouts of excitement.  I only have one functioning power pack, but that was enough to set up  a loop and let them run one train at a time on it.  This has been very popular.

 

We haven't really proceeded very far with anything yet but I'm looking forward to working on it.  Its a "closet railroad" which fits perfectly into the closet in our spare room (and by "perfectly" I mean "perfectly after I had to saw about 5cm off the board").  This was a necessary precondition to getting some people on board with my plan to set up a railway (way easier to sell if you can promise not to take up any prime floor space in a room) but it also has a valuable function since the closet doors can protect it from two young siblings running around the house wreaking their usual havoc when its not in use.

 

I'll revive this thread and start posting updates as we work on it!  When I started this thread it was a solo project, now I've got two helpers which should make things more interesting 🙂

[cteno4]

This will be so fun to watch!

 

cheers

 

jeff

[Sean]

Thanks, hopefully it will be fun to post about too 🙂 

[cteno4]

The glee of small children is one of the best things in life! (From a small child at heart)

 

cheers, 

 

jeff

[Sean]

I picked up two new (well, new to me) Kato Power Packs off of Yahoo Auctions this week and we now have a functioning dual loop mainline all set up.  This allows my kids to race trains against each other, which is quite fun (have to give the inner loop train a bit of lead time).  

 

We got the buildings from my old layout more or less set up, and the frame of what will be a mountain with a temple on it.  Otherwise the scenery is a project we'll probably start over the Christmas/New Years holiday.

 

This is a video of my son and I playing with a Chuo mainline train and an Arashiyama Zoo train.  He's quite into it, he loves moving the buildings around to create little scenes (but hasn't gotten used to handling them with the requisite care, I have a lot of signs, water tanks, doorways, etc to glue back onto buildings when I get around to it....)

 

One hard editorial decision I had to make was to cut the baseball stadium that I had built from scratch 8 years ago (as detailed in earlier posts on this thread).  Taking it out of the box I realized I had not constructed it with it being easily disassembled/reassembled in mind - its basically a mess of different parts, some of which require quite a bit of repair.  Plus it takes up too much space, so its gone back into the box to await some hypothetical future in which I live in a house with enough space to house a larger layout!  I also had four architectural models of apartment buildings (also detailed in earlier posts), but could only find space for two of them so the others are also going back into the box.  Everything else from the previous incarnation of this layout though has found a home.

 

 

Edited November 22, 2022 by Sean

[Sean]

I stopped in a 100 Yen shop (Daiso) on the way home from work on Tuesday and found they were selling little strings of LED lights which seemed they would be useful for something on a layout.  On getting them home I discovered they were just the right size to provide lighting to one of my station's platforms. 

 

Gotta love the 100 Yen shops.

[Sean]

Busy weekend at our house.  Got to work on some of the rural/mountain scenery.

 

Edited December 4, 2022 by Sean

[Sean]

Busy weekend at my house, kids and I finally got to work on the mountain/rural part of the layout.  For some reason we decided to build the mountain from top to bottom rather than the other way around.  

[Sean]

It sits next to the big city.  Still gotta do the scenery on the base.

[railsquid]

Oooh, those shelves give me an idea for the empty corner space above one end of my layout.

[Sean]

I got those shelves at a Seria 100 Yen shop (actual cost was 400 Yen each since you have to buy 2 brackets and 2 pieces of wood) and they work great.  Very handy for storing stuff that doesn't have a home in the layout.

[Sean]

Added some trees to the ekimae shopping street.

[Sean]

Added some lighting to the buildings.

[Jimbo]

an all this time i thought Murphey's pub was in Ireland !!

[cteno4]

That and Starcup Coffee.

 

jeff

[Sean]

3 hours ago, Jimbo said:

an all this time i thought Murphey's pub was in Ireland !!

 

I actually named that after a real Murphy's Pub in Japan, owned by an Irish friend 🙂

https://www.tripadvisor.com/Restaurant_Review-g1022818-d7526630-Reviews-Murphy_s_Akashi_Irish_Bar-Akashi_Hyogo_Prefecture_Kinki.html 

Edited December 12, 2022 by Sean

[Sean]

Kiddo and I have been busy for the past week landscaping the mountainside on the right side of the layout.  We`ve got most of the forest done, and added a little station for the Randen line, located next to a small cattle farm (with a cow that has wandered off about to interfere with traffic). This has been a lot of fun.

[Sean]

Also got the tunnels underneath the cattle farm more or less settled and have started ballasting the track down there.

Edited January 17, 2023 by Sean

[MeTheSwede]

Looks quite impressive!

[Sean]

Thanks, we're having a lot of fun with it!

[JR 500系]

I like the feel of the mountain with the houses on it, very nice! Great that the kiddo is involved in building as well! Kudos!

[Sean]

Thanks。we tried to cram as much stuff as we could onto the mountain (and the rest of the layout)!  This seems to be our main design principle.  

[railsquid]

1 hour ago, Sean said:

Thanks。we tried to cram as much stuff as we could onto the mountain (and the rest of the layout)!  This seems to be our main design principle.  

 

Totally prototypical for Japan 😉.