Littledene Revisited

Updates to this blog have been extremely far and few between, I am sorry to say (guess I'm just not the "blogger"type).  So, without further ado, here is the latest news...

Sadly, Littledene is no more, having suffered at the hands of a (so-called) experienced haulage company when we shifted back to Christchurch from Wellington nearly two years ago.

Since then, I have had more than ample time to contemplate what was wrong with the layout. Operationally, it was the cat's whiskers and fulfilled the needs of this type of shunting puzzle. It was compact (four square feet and, no, I'm not metrically challenged, I just happen to still think in feet and inches) and extremely portable.

So, what was wrong with it?

Aesethically, it looked ... toylike!

The original Inglenook concept calls for two sidings branching off a mainline, and, whilst this is not your common or garden variety NZR track layout, research provides us with at least one example of an NZR Inglenook, Onehunga Yard c.1950s. Instead, I opted for a mainline, loop and backshunt variant - your prototypical NZR yard. Attemping to model this arrangement, however, especially within the confines of the traditional Inglenook limits (5-3-3), was spacially wrong. Add to this: Littledene Station (Class B); a loading ramp on the 3rd road; Littledene Main Street with Mechanics Institute Hall, 4 Square Grocery, several houses (all modelled in low relief) and a railway crossing.

What I failed to consider was how cramped everything looked, given that Littledene is supposed to be a fair-sized community located somewhere on the vast mid-Canterbury plains (for those not in on the joke, Littledene is a sociological narrative of Oxford during the 1930s). And my relative inexperience with layout design meant I was not able to achieve the sense of space needed, even when modelling in NZ120.

Time has lessened the somewhat bitter disapointment I originally experienced upon unpacking Littledene after the shift. In fact, I now consider the packers did me a favour (of sorts).

So, it's time to move on to new challenges.