South Oak Road

A starting point

After the dust had settled from the birth of our son, it wasn’t long before I started daydreaming about a new modelling project. The new railway room was and is literally “the smallest room in the house”. Having removed the old ‘fixtures’ (mainly plumbing) I was left with a rather challenging 1550×1250mm (5ftx4ft) space.

The new railway “room”.

With a considerable investment in OO rolling stock I resisted the temptation to switch to N gauge and started exploring options for a small shelf layout. A whole world of potential opened up for me when I came across two fantastic websites. Carl Arendt’s Micro layout design website and Adrian Wymann’s Shunting puzzles website.

Both website’s highlight the huge operational and scenic potential that can be achieved in an extremely small space! After spending many enjoyable hours browsing the many track plans and operational options available on on these sites I settled on a layout based on Carl Arendt’s Smithfield Street Yard.

Essentially a distilled version of the popular Timesaver style shunting puzzle, the traverser, partially concealed beneath the terraced houses, doubles as a very useful run around loop. Despite its small size, with the aid of simple shunting puzzle style rules, it delivers plenty of operational capacity. This was confirmed over several enjoyable evenings, when I constructed a 1:10 scale card version of the track plan with similarly scaled representations of my locos and rolling stock.

View the track plan here.