The Morpeth Line
One of the reasons houses cost so much is that we have to purchase the expertise of a range of people with experience and qualifications in fields most of us know little or nothing about; people such as solicitors, architects and builders. By contrast, very few of us feel compelled to hire in expertise to help us build our model railways. As everyone in this hobby starts as a beginner, we all tend to make similar mistakes and, if we stay in the hobby long enough, travel up the same learning curve. I’ve been involved in this hobby long enough to make plenty of mistakes and, while I don’t tend to make the same mistakes twice, there’s always plenty of new mistakes to make that I haven’t tried out before. Before we get down to brass tacks here are a few of my hard-won pearls of wisdom that inform all my layout designs:
• Allow the prototype to inform your design but don’t let it stop you from getting what you want.
• Design for the person you will be in ten years, not the person you are now; inevitably you will get older, less mobile and probably fatter.
• Without a shed the size of a football field and a budget that would make Bill Gates think twice, you probably won’t be able to ‘have it all’ on one layout.
• Seek advice regarding your plan from experienced modellers and, if you don’t know any, join a model railway club; they’re bound to have a few ‘experts’ lurking about.
It’s difficult to gauge the success — or otherwise — of a model railway because the people who build them have such a variety of different needs. However, if you’ve stopped working on the
