A placeholder to keep my dreams in reach…

Just over a month ago I allowed myself to dream once more of a prairie based model railway. It’s a dangerous pastime filled largely with disappointment, the Canadian prairies are a massive expanse of rolling agricultural land spreading across Manitoba, Saskatchewan and Alberta…

The wonderful photos I can use to remind myself of first hand experience show long trains dwarfed by that big big sky. Branchlines don’t exist like we know them, in the 80s a local might haul 80+  Coke cans along lightly laid track spotting a couple every ten miles at each elevator, tying up for the night after a long shift and returning the next day to collect loaded cars…

I just don’t have the space. Chris and I enjoyed allowing ourselves to day dream of an N scale basement sized layout where this is all that happens…

Reality bites though, neither of us has the space, and N scale couplings… don’t get me started.

Yet here I am still grappling with distilling a feeling onto a shelf, in the way that Lochdubh is a promise for a future James, perhaps this could be too - building a small cameo now doesn’t mean I can’t one day run that local…

I placed some track on the shelf once more, and for some reason stood at the end, above, and took a photograph…

This then happened. A realisation that perhaps a Lochdubh type scene that allowed limited operation but lots of day dreaming might be feasible on my usual Lack footprint… curiously this is a very similar footprint to Cwmmawr!

My birthday RDC can shuttle on and off stage hidden left by the elevator and wing, and right on to an un scenic’d sector. The F7s can shuffle a grain car from the loading to the central track, as if building a train… this could, as Chris suggested, be an endless game if a sector or traverser is used off stage! How feasible this would be sort of depends on whether I enclose the end or not, as uncoupling would be impossible otherwise… which sort of almost feels doable. I do have a spare Lack shelf, I just don’t have anywhere to mount it on the wall. I do have enough N scale stock, just not with reliable couplings… I do have the energy, perhaps this doesn’t really need to run - but just look, just feel right?

Until next time. More soon… 

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