Ben Weiner
Part 3. Design, principles, board building
Orchard Wharf is end to end. The core of the layout is a straight run of boards, 16 ft by 2 ft. To this armature are added front and back extensions, basically carrying scenery only, plus (not fully envisaged at the time) left and right hand extensions carrying storage for trains. Traversers, limiting train length to a little under four feet, are mounted on both end boards but they’re set back so that the scenery can span the full 16 ft of those core boards.
The club is limited in storage space, and exhibition layouts need to be transportable. We intended right from the start to build the storage in sync with the boards. This was before the 2020 pandemic and the war in Ukraine, but the decision still meant a fairly large financial outlay on wood: everything was built from birch ply for its strength, freedom from warping and ease of working.
We originated the open-frame boards in CAD and the parts were CNC cut. Everything came together very well.
Transportability came in the form of three large crates with lids and runners on which the boards are rested. An error we would hope not to repeat is that we used the full width of 8 ft by 4 ft sheets to form our boards. Hence when it came to make the crates we needed sheets larger than this. It would have been better to reduce the dimensions of the main boards: we would not have missed a couple of inches off each of them too much. Plus, the whole lot would go through doorways more easily!
To make a further virtue of the necessity these crates, resting on their lids, support the layout when it’s set up.