That afternoon, I spent trawling through Carl Arendt's MICRO LAYOUTS FOR MODEL RAILROADS site, and

landed on Jack Trollope's Box Street. This looked more and more appealing as the day went on and then by chance I found a piece of 4mm ply 6 feet be 12 inches hiding in the shed. I was in buisness.

I wanted the baseboard to be as simple as possible, so I did away with the sector place, replacing it with a small radius point. This only seemed to add six inches on to Jack's layout, so I wouldn't have to cut the ply.

I checked that all the spurs would take the correct number of cars without any problems. 3 cars or loco and two cars on the back road.

Two cars clear of the switch on the covered road.

Two 54' covered hoppers of the flour spur.

As these 54' Atlas' Center Flow Pressureaide Cars were the biggest cars I was going to use, so I needed to check they,d fit in the spurs either side .....

.........of the run-round loop

I also checked that they would fit in the loop......

..... and a large locomotive could get past them..

....at both ends with out any problems

The next two day were spent building the baseboard, laying the track and wiring it up

A 2" by 1" framing was added to the plywood and the track glued straight down on to the ply.

To operated the turnouts I used a length of HO rail with a paper clip solder to the end of it. It runs through a connector block which was glued to the underside of the layout, to hold it in place.

The end of the rail that sticks through the front of the layout had a small wooden knob stuck on it.

The electrics are very simple, as only one locomotive is used at anyone time, all tracks are wired to a Gaugemaster handheld controller and a MRC diesel sound unit. The brass thing is the speaker is for the Sound Box,these are great for small layouts

Monday morning was spent back at the hospital for more X-rays. In the afternoon I set out the background building

The buildings are a mixture of Walthers background kits

and Pikestuff with plenty of details added on.

Once I had an idea of where they were going all I had to do was build them.

While I was doing that it was time...

.... to test it all out, my twin boys Thomas and Jack did that job for me.

....and seemed to have a good time.....

Tuesday I built up the buildings and painted the ply green, adding some Woodlands earth and turf to it before it had time to dry.

Wednesday it all went wrong (hence no photos) the grass looked to flat and unreal...

But then on Thursday I found a "Forest in a box" (Sea moss I think) that I'd picked up years ago from a model rail show. With a bit of my wife's hairspray I covered the sea moss, then sprinkled it with woodlands blended turf.

My first tree.....eight more soon followed and were glued on the the layout. Next I tried some Woodlands foliage,

this stuff is great, gets rid of all the hard edges and blends it altogether...

As a footnote, once I have taken some photos of it out side I emailed Carl Arendt. His reply was"I do believe it's your long-ago version of the minimum space Timesaver, making use of a single slip switch to preserve John Allen's shunting arrangement in a space saving configuration." I told him it wasn't but his reply was"Ok, Chris, if that's your story I'm certainly not about to contradict it! But surely you haven't forgotten Shrunken Headshunts at http://carendt.us/microplans/pages/shelf/dense/index.html#3 ???" I had forgotten all about it, or had I......