Cadeby Reborn

I have previous form for finding baseboards that I'd forgotten about, and the reason why I bought them.

This week, we are having various disasters with the plumbing in the house. All of the expensive kind .
The silver lining is I had to access the furthest corner of my office - where I found a Tim Horn kit for a 2ft by 18" photo plank, still in its packaging.

I suspect I bought it back at the cottage ready to build the next version of my Cadeby-based, layout. It seemed a timely discovery, given that I'd  just bought the Hornby wooden barracks block. And James Hilton produced a great build of a Fourdees Bagnall kit

Whilst on mute in a particularly boring ISO meeting, I began to explore a way forward.

It is not as straightforward as I thought. 

The extra space is useful, but is it enough?

My original plan was to change from an end-to-end layout with an automated shuttle module to a continuous run. On top of which, I wanted to have a building to sit where what was then the new Rectory, without being quite as ugly. 

I'm not sure that is feasible. The barracks building is surprisingly large.

I could, I suppose, build a pastiche of the layout room, about two-thirds of the size, and use the Hornby one on a pure photo plank.

The only way I believe I can fit a continuous run is to use a relatively extreme radius for the fictional section. Does that matter if the motive power is all going to be small 0-4-0s or the little Simplex and Ruston?

The Rectory will have to go. The downside is that it would have made a good scenic disguise for how short the track is. Could I replace it with something? Even just a line of preserved road vehicles?

The original micro was designed from the outset to be viewable from any side. The Tim Horn baseboard is only viewable from the front. Should I put the platform and the stock sidings at the front, or the back?

I thought it was obvious to put them at the front, so even if nothing was moving, people could see the stock. But I'm having second thoughts. It isn't how visitors could see the line, and the wooden fence separating it from the New Rectory was part of so many photos of the railway.

And one of my favourite views of the layout was standing on the road outside, watching , very briefly, a train, glimpsed through the trees. I think I'm persuading myself to go in that direction. 

The last issue is The Dell, where Sgt. Murphy rested, and I used to play on his footplate.

You'll have to imagine the intervening trees, they don't fit in its current bookshelf niche

Well, that and my actual plan for this weekend was sketching out a TT120 IoW Central layout based on Wootton Station, that I could call The Wight Lines.