The Fall of Jerusalem

It's been two years since I last blogged about Jerusalem, and almost two years since I started looking at modelling in OO9. In all that time Jerusalem has hardly been used, and in fact for over half of that time the layout has been stored in the loft to give me more space to model other things. While I enjoyed building Jerusalem and learnt a lot I'm happy to admit that there were many things that were wrong with it. The curves were two tight for a mainline, as seen by the problems with the carriage and the tunnel, the track was badly laid which led to some derailments and the points didn't work well as I relied on the blades to switch the power. In fact the whole layout concept was a serious compromise.

If you remember back to the very beginning of Jerusalem the choice of building in N gauge was purely motivated by me wanting a continuous run layout and not having the room to build such a layout in OO gauge. In retrospect this was a mistake as I'm much happier working in 4mm to the foot scale or above than the 2mm to the foot of N gauge. So when tidying the loft last weekend I made the decision that given all the problems with Jerusalem I was never going to go back to it, and will probably never return to such a small scale either, so the layout was simply taking up valuable storage space.

So as you can see the layout has come down from the loft and anything useful has been stripped from the layout, and the board has now been dumped in the garage ready to go out with the rubbish (or to the tip if I can't be bothered breaking it down further). Some of the parts, like the trees, might be reusable in 4mm scale but I'll hold on to the rest as well as there is no resale value in a few painted animals and some dry stone walling. The loco and rolling stock though are likely to be sold to provide funds for more modelling as it seems silly having them sat collecting dust when I have no sentimental attachment to them.