Coffee Table
(Micro Layout)

< Back to Micro Layouts

This is my absolute pride and joy! It has it's place in the lounge as a centre show piece. 

A glass topped teak coffee table with a shelf below, measuring 2' square. I'd been on the lookout for one for a long time when this one popped up on a FaceBook freebie page during the early days of lockdown. A trip down the road to someone's drive and it was mine!

In many ways it is similar to The Old Mine layout. Cathy said if it was going in the lounge she wanted a village scene. So again we have a very typical English Village.... which obviously you never really see!

The trick here was to make it in such a way that it was viewable from all four sides. Unlike most of my other layouts, there are no backscenes, and each of the four corners have different scenes of their own.

Track-wise it consists of one simple oval, buildings-wise it gets a lot more complex! It was deliberately built with a vision of 'the more you look the more you see'. It has all the obvious elements.... Pub, church, station etc, one corner has sea with a harbour containing the masted fishing trawler, the other larger corner has the castle come stately home on the hill.... and then there's the details....

In the sea there is a poor chap drowning(!), in another corner we have a small cottage with it's own (scratch built) observatory... it's being visited by Professor Brian Cox and Brian May of Queen (he has his 'Red Special' guitar with him). In the village the road workers have dug a hole in the street, there is a small shack selling teas to those just off the train, the village square has a market, clock tower and a bandstand (scratch built), whilst outside the church is the war memorial with poppies laid, and the Devon flag flying.

Despite being a single line, the station has two platforms (perfectly feasible as it happens in the real world), one for the passengers to board the trains, the other is a part of the harbour wharf that has crates unloaded from the boats. On the harbour side there are little sheds, a lifebouy (someone needs to throw that in the sea quick!), plus a jetty with fishermen going for a big catch.

All the street lights work, and the all the buildings are lit via remote controlled LEDs.

All the buildings are Metcalfe, either from kits or in several cases scratch built by myself. The three shop complex is a kitbash surrounding what was once a railway workers cottage. The various flower boxes around the village are made from small bits of card.

The track is Peco, and vehicles are by Oxford Diecast. The trawler is another from a beach shop at Cadgwith Cove in Cornwall.... it still has Cadgwith written on it's hull as a reminder of that holiday!