Left over scenery items, spare space, and left over insulation foam becomes the basis for a tropical themed HO scale micro layout.
With the left over bamboo, palm trees, and agave plants purchased for the Brazilian Micro Layout, and a fairly large amount of XPS insulation foam left over from construction of the Brazilian Micro Layout, it seemed like a good idea to build another micro pizza layout. This second micro pizza layout has been in the early planning (ie, just thinking very vaguely about it and wondering what scale and gauge to use on it) for quite some time, with the Petra Pizza layout positioned on legs with a new 600mm x 600mm baseboard under those legs around June 2020.
With the provision for the second pizza layout, that flat space became a place where many and varied items found themselves. Items like scenery and foliage, tools, wood, etc. Until recently. Now I have started construction of this tropical pizza by adding the XPS insulation foam to the existing base under the legs.
After this, I had to decide on a track plan. I didn’t want this pizza layout to be just a plain circle of track like the Petra Pizza, so I made various track plans in GIMP to give me an idea of the possibilities.
So far, I haven’t settled on any of the plans above. Although I am leaning heavily towards a plan somewhere between plans 4 and 5 above. Plans 4 and 5 are somewhat inspired by the late Carl Arendt’s ‘Square Foot Estate’ G scale layout. I figured that if 1 square foot can work for G scale, the 4 square feet should work for HO scale! The plan so far is to make the layout to depict a part of a small western Pacific tropical island nation, where bamboo and agave are grown and exported. The railway itself will be HO scale, standard gauge like all my other layouts, and will be operated with Australian outline ready to run equipment (eg, small ex-NSWGR X200 series 2 axle switcher / shunter and some 2 axle open wagons).
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