Here are some photos of the small layout that I started work on several years ago as a toe-in-the-water exercise. I've very little modelling exerience of any sort, apart from helping my father with his model railway in the 1960s and a bit of simple model-making when I worked in an architect's office in the 1970s. I retired last year, and finally blew the dust off the layout just before I came to our first meeting.

The whole layout is 120x30cm on a rather over-engineered timber, MDF and particle board base which I'm not sure I'd use again. However it does have the advantage that I can dribble solder all over the back of it and bash it with hammers without doing any damage.

The goods yard area (above) is almost finished. However, there's a lot still to be done on the whole right-hand end of the layout, especially the area around the station building (below), which is based loosely on Kingscote station on the Bluebell line. It doesn't look quite this ropey in reality, by the way; flash seems to magnify every little blemish!

Final picture above is of the Association wagon kit I've built, and my first loco - a scratch-built Jinty body on a Bob Jones chassis kit. Next project is to re-convert a Farish 94xx that I did myself right at the beginning, but this time using an Association coversion kit for the 94xx that never actually made it to market, kindly supplied as a one-off by Bill Blackburn. Then I guess I need to finish that station area, and think about scratch-building some LB&SCR carriages and maybe a Terrier loco. By that time I ought to have enough experience to plan a more ambitious layout.