Hello All, As a newbie to this forum, I would like to introduce myself in a few words. Living in the Belgian Ardennes, I retired in 2005 and thus had plenty of time to care for my bonsai collection. Soon after I played with the idea of taking up the railroad hobby which I put aside 25 years before. But N scale really got the better of my eyesight so I decided to turn large scale trains. Used to indoor layouts as I was, the first attempt was a timesaver yard on a 20 x 3 foot construction in the attic. It was closely modeled after an idea developed in a 2004 issue of Model Railroader (sorry, don’t remember which one!) The first two pictures show the early stages of construction.
Each car had it’s own fixed location - 3 on each spur. The idea was to draw 3 cards and then making up the consist in that order, while replacing the unused cars back on their spot before the train could leave the yard. Well… at least it was supposed to leave because there was nowhere to go due to lack of space onder the roof… This is not so easy when there are only a few empty spots to manoeuver the cars!
The turnouts were all LGB 18000 series, modified for centralized manual operation.
The buildings were scratchbuilt from wood and only suitable for indoor use and were adapted to the cars supposed to serve them. They all were built to 1:29 scale from plans featured in “Model Railroader” and “Railroad Model Craftsman” between 1972 and 1980. The cattle pen :
Icing plant and dock :
And a general store based on our local DIY store.
Soon after that, some track was laid outside in the garden. But that’s another story! Frans
We moved to a new home in the same village but nearer public commodities soon afterwards… Happens all too often isn’t it? I’ll try to post more news in a new topic this weekend about the evolution of the new outdoor layout which is well under way 
