The Little World

You may never experience three-star Michelin fine dining in your life. But you can certainly get a good bowl of soup – just look for the Heinz or Campbell label.

It will not have the wonderful ingredients and spices of the restaurant’s speciality…but you will be able to depend upon it. So it is with the tables and frameworks that might support a model railway. You can have bespoke furniture or off-the-rack timber…and you can also have economical ready-made solutions.

I am contemplating just such a choice for my toy train layout. as such things do, it has progressed in the planning from a simple oval on two tables to a point-to-point around the circumference of my hobby room with far more track and construction. The benchwork alone would be 3/4 of a year’s work, what with shifting furniture and carpentry. My experience of this sort of thing is it never works as well as planned and costs far more in time and money.

As this is to be a toy-train themed exercise and I do not want to spend a great deal, I have been costing out commercial shelf units and racks. I once used Dexion sheet metal shelving and L-girders to construct a layout and later turned the components back into workshop shelving for my home. Great stuff and fun to do but cost-prohibitive these days.

IKEA furniture nearly does the job but they have difficulty supplying their most popular pieces.

The current favourite looks to be standard blow-moulded 6-foot trestle tables from our local DIY warehouse. They have constant dimensions and height – a necessity for trackwork – and the weight on them will not be excessive.

A modeller who contemplated mountains, valleys, and multi-level scenery would not be served by this. They need the adaptability and variety of wooden frames and forms. I will be modelling a prairie toy train set and flat is all I want or need.