My boys received hornby train sets at Christmas 2021. Their enthusiasm for getting the trains running was surprising and infectious, but there is a pretty low ceiling to the enjoyment that can be gained from a simple single track oval loop set up on the living room floor. This log documents my abandoned attempt to make a fully scenic layout on a roll out board that lives under their bed.

Until this point I had never done any model railroading apart from a rapidly aborted attempt that I remember making with my brother Dad when I was quite young. Still, I consider the hobby at least adjacent to wargaming given the obvious parallels between terrain building and scenic modelling. In fact, as a youngster, there weren’t really any publications dedicated to wargame terrain building and of course no internet, so I used to read railway modelling books to learn all my early techniques for scenery building, and this habit continued into adulthood where I have been known to pick up model railway magazines just to read the scenic modelling parts. So that is obviously where my own interest lies in this project (as opposed to train operation which I know is the preoccupation of a large number of model rail hobbyists).