Planning
Before I could start construction I needed to come up with a detailed design so that I could order the track. The site measures about 4.8m by 4.6m and slopes down by about 15cm. My son was keen to have at least one bridge and so I came up with some designs that exploited the slope to gain height whilst keeping the track at ground level.
South Cerney Station
As I mentioned in my original post I wanted to use the track layout from the former station in my village:
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This has quite a complex layout for a small station and it was a challenge reducing the length to 3.6m to fit lengthways with a first radius curve at each end. I did consider having the station on a diagonal to give me more space but I did not like the appearance as much.
In the absence of any suitable track layout software I used Visio on my work laptop to come up with a few designs using a modified LGB template that I found online.
This was one of the early drafts:
View attachment 271739
This seemed to work quite well so I calculated what track I needed and added a couple of points and a few extra straights as I was keen to have a passing loop.
My biggest challenge was that I wanted to get two of the Piko Roncalli Battery RC Starter Sets but these were only on pre-order and I needed the curves in these sets to complete the layout. I emailed Darren at
Top Slots n Trains who as well as offering a great price also offered to send me the curves now and would then remove them from the sets when he received them so that I could start building immediately, a top bloke!
A few days later I received a very large box containing the following:
View attachment 271740
I quickly checked that I could recreate the station layout as planned
View attachment 271741
All looking good, in my next post I will start on the construction side of things.