Beaglington-On-Sea 00 gauge in 6ft by 4ft

[Alexander Court]

Greetings once again from the Island of Siddington, a large Anglo-Irish Island uncertain of its true geographical position, and this time I welcome you to Beaglington-On-Sea! Named after our former ginger cat Beagueen, Beaglington-On-Sea (pronounced B-yug-ling-ton ) is a new version of a layout I built in 2016 . Beaglington is a 6ft by 4ft 00 gauge layout set against white cliffs and the sea, part of the Lourlan, Beaglington & Siddingtion Coast Railway, this layout is currently in the bare boards phase.

In the morning I will post some photos I hope and explain what I am up to.

Thanks,
Alexander

[Alexander Court]

First up I will start with the plan, I spent a long time trying to figure out what I want to achieve this time around, and trying to make a compromise where needed, in the end I decided that, while I could have a siding at the front of the layout leading to a goods shed and a loco spur/engine shed, the likelihood of me finding time to do any shunting was low, but I wanted to have them for at least some operational interest, likewise there are points between the ovals of the new plan to allow for trains to switch between them but again I don't know if that will happen much, here is the plan anyways that I came up with:

There have been a few changes since I designed this, firstly I think I would do without the crossover between the inner two ovals in the station area as its not really necessary, second is that the part on the right with the yellow and green was going to be a low rail bridge across sand that would lead to a beach, I've decided against this now as I'm not keen on raising the whole trackbed and losing the nice level baseboard surface just to put this feature in, I'll maybe attempt some dunes though on the outside of the third oval in that corner between the track and the beach.
In this version of the plan the cliff is rather straight backed and this was initially to allow me to build a 6ft by 1ft shunting puzzle over the rear off-scene area, giving me the shunting potential I originally wanted, but subsequent to setting up the track on the board I've decided I'd rather have a but more of the front space scenic and a more natural looking cliff run.
My plan for buildings is to make a nice seaside town, but fill it full of licensed premises, pubs and bars and such, I want at least 12 different ones so I can run a '12 pubs of christmas' excursion. These drinking holes will either be named as (or give a nod to) ones which I used to live near or frequent or found significant enough to remember. One of the places I want to have something similar to is the building of the Brasserie Cotentine, in Barneville-Carteret on the Normandy coast, which happens to be inside a converted station building.

I am going to be upgrading all my much laid and ripped up and relaid hornby track to all new peco code 100 rails for this layout.

I'll try get some photos and more written up later on, right now the wifey is pestering me to do some house work (fun way to spend a day off work while you are also sick haha)

Thanks for reading,
Alexander

[Alexander Court]

So, time for the first proper update, Since moving to Ireland I have built various baseboards for my layouts myself, and quite frankly I'm getting tired of it, and I decided that If I'm going to build a permanent layout that is going to last me the next ten years or so (until it needs refreshing) I was going to invest in a professionally crafted baseboard. The one I purchased was a 6 by 4 sized table made out of two 4 by 3 board/frame sections and six legs, I bought it from Model Railway Baseboards Ireland, I paid over the phone and the three packages arrived with DPD a few days later, I assembled it by myself and this is how it looked:

As for my new plan, well I had decided to get all new track, but my budget as yet has not stretched that far, so at the moment its mostly shoddy old hornby track that's be laid and relaid over the last 8 or 9 years, with the new addition of this:

And the quality of the track in this new pack compared to my old track is pretty much astounding really, I'm looking forward to a complete upgrade.
Alexander

[Alexander Court]

I'm going to attempt to post some progress now, starting with a few pics of the rough track plan set up:

And here's a little photo of 'E.R.M.' who is usually on hand when building my layouts.

I'm going to resize some more photos to show how much further I have got.

Thanks,
Alex.

[Pierlùk]

Nice start. I'll be following this with interest. Where did you find your goods shed ? Thanks.

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[Alexander Court]

Nice start. I'll be following this with interest. Where did you find your goods shed ? Thanks.

GOODS SHED.JPG

It's a Superquick card kit, it has been battered about a bit and may end up being replaced eventually.

I was going to upload more yesterday but my laptop decided it s Windows 7 operating system is no longer genuine and ceased to be cooperative.

Thanks,
Alexander.

[Alexander Court]

It looks to me like you have a good plan.

It’s strange that most seaside places have a sackful of pubs.

Thanks, I live in Waterville in rural South West Kerry at the tip of the Iveragh Peninsula, and yet we are ranked 3rd or 4th highest in pubs to people ratio. There's about 10 or twelve places, something like a pub to every 25 villagers. I f orget the total population though.

Alexander

[Bufferstop]

I forget the total population though.

With that many pubs to keep profitable it's a wonder anyone can remember anything

[Alexander Court]

I forget the total population though.

With that many pubs to keep profitable it's a wonder anyone can remember anything

I was upstairs at work doing some winter housekeeping tasks, deep cleaning showers, and after cleaning in the crevices of the cubicle in one of our rooms I rinsed down the cubicle and then turned the shower back off. Now when I clean the showers usually there is a little overspill on the floor from washing the outside of the glass, but not much. Anyways I was just drying the glass when the smoke alarm goes off and one of my coworkers rushes in asking me if I've flooded the bathroom because water is coming through downstairs in the bar and I was looking at the floor wondering if I could have really spilt that much but she didn't think it was me and she rushed out and I followed. I had assumed there was only a small drip like one or two we've had before but as I came out of the room we found the air cloudy (and I did panic there might have been a real fire, and its possible there could have been) we turned left through the door that leads to the visitors lounge and on the left there is the office door with the safe and the computer servers and stuff in for the website and whatnot, and steam was pouring from the top of the door, my boss and two more of my coworkers (all three of my coworkers are my bosses daughters, it being a family run irish pub) were stood outside and when we opened the door we were engulfed in a wall of hot steam, luckily though my boss had turned off the water. A pipe had come loose and flooded the whole room but luckily the notes in the safe were banked that morning and everything else is raised above the ground. Downstairs the guests in the back bar had a nice hot shower, but Ironically the only person who didn't was the only person in an actual shower, me. Life is far from dull out here in the wilds of Kerry.

Also, apologies for lack of posting due to the copy of windows 7 I purchased to fix my laptop turning out to be not being genuine it has made the laptop refuse to do simple tasks sometimes. I'm going to attempt to resize and post some pictures very shortly.

Thanks,
Alexander.

[Alexander Court]

Just a quick post now about a little detailing I did, I found some unpainted hornby crew members and some unpainted 1/100 scale people Sid had bought me off of Wish or somewhere ages ago and decided to paint them and some cab interiors and get some of my locomotives crewed up as it were.

I painted up the cabs of my LMS 'Holyhead', LNER 'Flying Scotsman', Southern 'Sir Dinadan' and BR Ex-GWR 'Helmingham Hall. Oh and a Hornby 2mt, and then crewed them all up as well as adding a long overdue fireman to the cab of my TTTE range 'Stepney'.

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Alex.

[Alexander Court]

Also I have this now, a recent purchase, a superdetailed hornby pullman with matchboard sides (below window height) called Aurelia, with a white roof. It was dirt cheap as a lot of the detailed bits are broken or missing and so is one buffer. I don't really mind, I'd like some more to go with it as it looks nice lit up but I wouldn't mind a rake of good condition short triang pullmans with new bogies fitted. It looks great anyways although has that appauling hornby cam coupling rotation system and the tails of the coupling hooks have had to be bent to the horizontal as the whole thing rides very low and the bottoms of the hooks were catching on sleepers and point work.

Time for lasagne before work,

Thanks for reading.

Alexander

[Alexander Court]

So, here is the start of the major structure on the layout, the cliff which will hide the rear of the oval and give the setting to the town in the middle of the layout. First of all I cut up some scraps of paper to help visualise how I would fit in the cliff.

With this mapped out I worked out a rough map of what I wanted to do within the town. I'm working off this penicilling in at the moment but I'm always thinking about how I might change it. I'm still interested in putting in a 009 line but not sure how to go about it without squashing up the town too much, we'll have to wait and see what happens there.

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With stuff mapped out I was able to start construction of the cliff, doing the easier to reach tunnel entrance first.

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With one end started I decided to make a sort of half way point along the cliff, simply a piece of card, glued in place to work as a back brace to the rest of the length of the cliff.

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I have run out of time now and have to go to work, so I'll try post more updates tomorrow.

Alexander

[Alexander Court]

Sometimes I think that I should plan more rather than just setting off on a journey

I suppose it depends what you find more fun/entertaining/interesting. I printed templates to see if I could squeeze 009 in but I can't, so I'll stick to the plan I've made for now, but considering replacing the kato track on my now non-working St. Renock Quay N gauge layout into 009 track from peco in future and see what can be done with it.

Alex

[Alexander Court]

Progress on the cliffs following on from the previous photo post...

As you can see the height of the cliffs in comparison to the buildings is now obvious and I hope it looks some way realistic:

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And now to go get photos off of my phone (if I can) to show where I am at now.

Alexander.

[Mountain]

It is coming along nicely!