CASTLE QUAY

At the beginning of this century, I changed career and became a gardener. Since then, I have designed and built three medal-winning gardens at the prestigious Chelsea Flower Show, including one based around an old railway carriage, which I now use as a studio/layout room. I’ve carried out maintenance work on numerous gardens and now design gardens for a living.

For 10 years, I looked after a 17-acre estate in Sussex then, in January 2017, I decided to pack it in. As a leaving present, I was given a bottle of wine and a wooden wine box. A while later, when driving down into nearby Hastings, I spotted the iconic net sheds at Rock-a-Nore. This set me thinking about the possibility of a micro layout in the wine box. Thus, ‘Castle Quay’ was born.

A compact puzzle

The box measured a mere 50cm × 32cm, so the layout had to be an exercise in compression. By using two right-hand points and some lengths of Peco crazy track, I found I could just fit in a five