Building the Orkhavnbanen layout

Building the layout was a long and laborious process we'd like to have seen shorter. Unfortunately, with our rate of building that was a challenge to say the least. We started in December 2001 with the wooden framework, which didn't take too much time. After that the endless days of shaping the landscape from styrofoam (you know, the stuff they stuff around your TV during shipping) and hundreds of loose 'rocks' made from gipsum. Four meters (14 feet) is quite long then! Today we can proudly say that the layout is kind of "finished". Obviously, we're never done detailing even more, but the major building work is done. Besides, we could always use and build more rolling stock.

A detail description of our time building the layout is available in a 5 part series of the Dutch magazine "Railmagazine" during 2007. In the series we'd tried to be as detailed as we could in our descriptions on how we tackled different issues and methods we used during building. Unfortunately, even the allocated space in the magazine is limited, so we build this website to provide additional information.