The brand new club project is Vaduz .

The Fiction

Vaduz is a small terminus station served by both the Austrian OBB and Swiss SBB. Despite its size the location sees a lot of activity due to the need to swap OBB and SBB locomotives on through workings between the two countries and the provision of stabling facilities for these.

There is some added interest in the form of a metre gauge Rhb line from Chur. This shares the single platform line with the standard guage resulting in a brief run of dual gauge track.

The Facts

In reality Vaduz is served by the nearby OBB through station, Schaan Vaduz, which as the name suggests is shared with Schaan. This has been adopted as the basis for the fictional terminus.

The Progress:

3 February 2008
In case anyone doesn't realise this, ballasting track is slow, tedious, and time consuming! Consequently the effort has been concentrated on ballasting at the board joins so the track can be cut. This milestone has now been achieved which means the layout can be dismembered and a) free up space in the clubroom, b) allow boards to be worked on individually by different people.

1 January 2008
A minor flurry of activity over the Christmas break means we enter 2008 with the track for the scenic areas laid, feed dropper wires added, and rails painted. Ballasting is now in progress. The additional (fifth) baseboard for the fiddle yard has been constructed and is just in need of legs.

16 September 2007
The additional point kits are on order. Track laying has commenced, woo hoo! As one of the principles of Vaduz is to try ideas which are new to us we're glueing the track down with contact adhesive instead of using track pins. Seems to be working well so far.

13 September 2007
The point kits have been assembled and we have all the flexible track so it's time to trial the layout of the track. Guess what, we need some more points for the locomotive roads and HOm 'off scene' staging!

9 September 2007
A layer of cork sheet has been glued across the top of each scenic baseboard. As the layout is almost all station this is not to provide a ballast shoulder but to help deaden sound and provide a base into which recesses for the building can be cut out.

22 June 2007
The layout now has legs. This has allowed it to be assembled as a free standing unit and the track plan finalised using paper templates for turnouts and actual items of rolling stock.

We've already decided to move the start of the fiddle yard halfway into the first scenic board. This means we'll need a fifth 'standard' board for the remainder of the fiddle yard. Originally it had been anticipated the fiddle yard would be a pair of slightly smaller but permanently hinged together boards.

5 June 2007
The baseboards for the scenic area are complete. We've built four of these rather than the originally planned three so the layout will be longer than intended. The boards are dowelled for bolting together, now we just need some legs for them to stand on!

As an experiment a prototype pair of 'X' legs such as you would find under and ironing board were cobbled together. These worked rather well but for ease and speed of construction it has been decided not to adopt the design for use on the layout at the moment.

29 April 2007
So far construction of the baseboards has commenced and we have a track plan: