Coy in a box...

I've recently mused about how a model railway (or railroad) can be born from the inspiration of it's lead actor, and I think acknowledging, owning up to this fact can free us from trying to make up excuses why we model the things we do... you don't need to have had a life long interest or passion for particular prototype railway or location, it might just be ok to like trains...

I've also recently finished building myself a Claremont and Concord 44t. This particular distraction can be wholly attributed to the introduction provided by Chris, and the wonderful Facebook group. What isn't there to love about these plucky little switchers shuffling one car at a time over ridiculously tight and steep old streetcar trackage serving the paper mills of Claremont well into the 1970s and beyond... since my introduction I've pondered a few ideas, from the more modern West Lebanon to a layout using the 44t based on Claremont Paper...

The first scheme though, was inspired by a 'spare' aluminium flight case that is occasionally moved around the workshop. It was initially for a 006.5 peat layout, but with that stalled it has kicked about with a few wintry trees inside it I built at Christmas 2019. This was shelved, literally, for the Claremont scheme, which solved some of the compromises I felt were forced on me by the ridiculously small baseboard of the box... but in bed last week, feeling sorry for myself with long Covid symptoms (the flight case has moved to under the chair in our bedroom) I wondered if something else could be done with the space and after sketching Chris a vision of his Coy layout, I suddenly thought, what if I folded a long thin layout in half!

You see that damn 44t has been (politely) shouting for it's own layout since it was finished, and with some H0 figures from Modelu recently painted and installed I am just dying to have somewhere to run it... add to that I like a challenge... and I wanted to see if there was perhaps another way to package up a portable layout in the case taking the baseboard, stock and controller with you in one. A mock up of the space available (on my desk) was useful, although still ridiculously cramped, and somewhat limited in operation, I got excited by the potential of running the 44t (that damn engine) and utilising my favourite trick, the Y, meaning I could maximise the length of run utilising the whole length twice to place a car in the spur... this parallels something of Chris's Coy's long siding... the joy of just watching and operating a customer who in real life, would be a pain to switch, but in model terms adds a lot of enjoyment - you almost savour the trip up and down the spur, even though it's wasted time, time that could be better spent having a cup of tea back at the workshop and office... but in our world, wasted time is time well spent.

How to fit it all in the box though? 

First of all two small 15 x 40cm baseboards in 6mm MDF, with a 6mm track bed on top to give a slight relief to the groundwork. These would be joined and aligned by buried magnets in their ends! Yes magnets... these with wires soldered to them to provide power to both boards. Next, the back-scene and structures would in fact be flats, 2D photo backdrops, adjusted on Photoshop and printed out, stuck to stiff card or plastic - they would need some means of being stood up, but this could be contrived relatively easily. Producing them may be more problematic, perhaps they would need to be a hodge podge of photo textures rather than photos per se. Third, the back scene would be a muted winter scene, over cast sky, grey trees without leaves, dull, lifeless, almost abstract but with enough texture to blend with the structures and layout colouring. The stock would be able to fit within a box, with just the 44t, a pair of box cars and the tank car being required. A controller and transformer could also be packed in under the baseboards but only if the baseboard trees were removable! This is potentially a compromise too far...

The whole concept is rather abstract, like I've distilled a wintry scene, dialled it back to it's raw essentials, muted colours, lifeless landscape, leafless trees... and then separated these elements out. Life, in fact colour, is provided by the 44t, it rumbles on set and all eyes follow it's every move. The muted stage set only emphasising its bright and cheerful nature... operation would be somewhat limited - no off set staging, cars would be swapped on the front track, embedded in the road. The 44t would be on stage all the time, uncoupling either by buried magnet or manual tool... the key to success here would be in the careful presentation of elements. If the scenic elements were dialled right back to basics the quality would need to be absolutely sublime, so nothing jarred. That wouldn't necessarily mean NO ground texture, indeed I'd like to bury some of the spur in the overgrown weed ridden degraded ballast that Chris has managed on his layout, but since the boards are essentially flat, the option of adding 3D scenery taller than blades of grass is probably limited... 

I like this idea...

It's abstract nature is perhaps stretching the 'stage set' to the theatrical, but it's low cost low risk... All could be mocked up with materials to hand here, including some off cuts of MDF, old lengths of track and a spare Y point (the spare, which seems to flit from project to project) if it 'fails' to satisfy the track work is easily re-used... and it might be enough, for now, to silence that damn engine...

Until next time, more soon...