Patrick Herlihy describes the building of his new layout which made its first public appearance at our club's exhibition in June 2007.

I decided about two years ago that I needed a change from building BR Western Region layouts. In the end the choice came down to either an American H0 layout or a German H0 layout. I decided on American H0 as it was a lot cheaper than German H0.

After dismantling my old layout and selling most of my rolling stock, I had a word with my friend Chris. Chris has been building N scale and 0 scale layouts over a number of years. Chris lent me some of his books on American railroads - one of the books he lent me was entitled "Small, Simple and Practical Track Plans" by Iain Rice.

In this book was a plan of a switching layout which measured 10ft x 2ft. This was about the same size as the baseboards of my old layout that I had dismantled. I had now found the layout that I wanted to build. I decided to do away with the loco siding on the original plan and add a passenger depot.

Having found the plan I liked, I needed to decide on the area and the period to model. In the end I picked the Great Northern in the 1960s. The reason I chose that railroad was that you don't see many Great Northern layouts at exhibitions. After replacing the tops of the baseboards, I bought the track, points and rolling stock and started to build the layout. Some of the work on assembling building kits and weathering rolling stock was done on a Thursday evening at the club meetings. The rolling stock came from a variety of sources. The locomotives are Atlas and Proto-2000, and the freight stock a combination of Atlas, Inter-Mountain, Walthers and Bachmann. I have weathered the boxcars to make them look more realistic.

I would like to thank the club for inviting me to exhibit my layout at the club's show in 2007. Finally I would like to thank my wife for helping me with my hobby.