Peco Rail 200: Let's All Go to the Model Village

Time to set out my stall for the Peco Rail 200 competition.  Well actually, I posted this on RMWeb, and needed to post it here too back in May, but then I got sucked into another big project, of which more in a future post. He threatens. Anyway; I’m a sucker for building a micro layout, and when I heard about this competition I thought it would give me a good project for the summer.

The board arrived nice and quickly, and is rather impressive.  Decent size, and nice thick wood.  I wanted something a bit fun, colourful, and perhaps a little silly. I also liked the idea of an entire railway (to make this effectively a self-contained, functional micro layout). 

One thing I thought of then, was a return -yet again- to my fictional Port Eden seaside resort, and a miniature railway. Port Eden has been rearing its head in my projects as a setting, off and on, since about 2006. Generally set in the 1990’s and drawing on my memories of places like Barmouth or Tenby when I was a child, Port Eden is meant to be somewhere in Western Cumbria, down at the Atomic Seaside end of the coast, south of Workington.

 

I figured a miniature railway would allow for the tight curves, but large-scale figures to allow the cramming-in of a lot of detail in a relatively small space. I’ve done this repeatedly in the past, once with 00 trains, and twice with TT/3mm stock. The 1/32nd Cakebox iteration of the miniature railway is the one above, and I figured the tight curves of one of those ‘railway in a tin’ type sets would quite easily fit the Peco board.

The next take on Port Eden after the Cakebox used much larger figures (yes, almost exclusively Dr.Who, raided from Younger Child's toybox. There’s clearly a weird multi-Doctor, multi-Companion special episode where they go to the beach in Western Cumbria instead of fighting Daleks).

The most recent iteration of Port Eden in 00, produced for (and winning) a competition for Hornby a couple of years back.

A comparison of the figure sizes, done when I started the Hornby competition. Included here because of the thoughts around the heights of figures. If I wanted to use the Dr.Who size figures this time, the height restrictions of the Peco competition would be a bit too limiting, it could at best be a diorama.

I definitely wanted a working railway, so I thought I'd be back into G-sized figures (as I went for with the Hornby competition in the end). There's some quite highly detailed figures available from some of the German manufacturers, and I thought a few of them would be better than lots of the cheaper, slightly naff figures you can get through the likes of eBay.

At this point, whilst hunting for photographs of that project, another idea reared its head... The version of the Port Eden Miniature Railway which ended up with the Dr.Who figures started life as this; a competition entry which was never completed. 

There was just a bit too much going on; a miniature railway running through a Model Village. At this point then for the Rail200 build, I decided to drop the miniature railway altogether, and focus on the model village itself as a setting for this competition layout.

This won't be the first time I've modelled a model village either; when I was at Uni in 2006, I did a whole project on a fake model village tourist attraction, but set in a "1984", "V for Vendetta" inspired dystopia- a bit of a contrast between chocolate-box villages and nostalgia, and the creeping authoritarianism of the mid-2000's (hah, glad the world got that out of it's system...). Anyway it was all a bit cliche and trite looking as a project, peering back on it from 20 years, but enjoyable in places. One of the scenes I did was the good old Model of the Model Village, Inside the Model Village which appears at real ones like Bourton on the Water. Built in a filebox, and using home-made buildings, upcycled toys and Z scale trains, I had my own little miniature dystopia inside a bigger miniature dystopia.

 

Anyway, this time for the Peco project, it's all going to be a bit happier and more colourful. What can I say, 40 year old me is more mature and less of a pretentious buffoon than 20 year old me was. And I love model villages, so this will be my chance to do something a bit more upbeat, inspired by a couple of my favourites.

The daddy of them all, Bekonscot. This does raise the question of scale again, mindyou. These custom-made trains run on G tracks, and are significantly underscale for the buildings around them (not that it's immediately obvious when you view it).

Then there's my favourite model village, Anglesey, as it was pre-Covid. The railway here was custom-built, more to scale with the surroundings.

I visited this place to document it for 'Garden Rail' magazine, and I loved it. Sadly the scale locomotives have been replaced by the regular old G scale Eurpoean-outline LGB trains on G track since, as the custom-made railway was decades old and failing. 

 

I'm stuck using Z tracks for this competition, simply because I have a ton of it in stock. It does leave me wondering what scale to do the figures though. Go large, and whilst the trains and buildings will be more to 'model village' scale, it will be a massively crammed-in scene.  But with the figures too small, the railway will look too much like miniature engineering rather than models.

Here's the initial plan anyway, and subject to my usual mission creep and changes. The track plan is a proper 'rabbit warren', of the sort which sets the hobby back decades. But then a model village feels like a good way to justify that sort of thing. The plan itself is based on one Arnold sold as a ready-made N layout back in the 1960's, minus any points. The layout doesn't need more than a single train whizzing endlessly round and round.

A quick concept pic of how I kind of want it too look; I think using mainly child figures (and only a couple at that) will help disguise how small the layout is, the compromise of not having to use tall adult figures.  It'll be set in a former walled garden to contain the scene (like the old Himley Model Village, the first such place I visited as a child). Z scale trains, home-made buildings, lots of greenery and bright colours. Enough signage to hint at the rest of the village off-scene, and the wider Port Eden tourist attraction. And an excuse to hide homages to things like "Hot Fuzz" (will there be a Big Cop in the Small Town?) and "Untitled Goose Game", which I've been playing recently with my Youngest.

 

Next job, the not inconsiderable task of finding where the box with the Z gauge track is, post house-move...