Seen on the Yahoo group yesterday. Someone looking for inspiration for a new layout, and pointing out that there hasn't been much new stuff posted recently (on the group). The first questions I would ask in reply are, how much space have you got, and what sort of operations do you want to see?(well, my first response was 'well, what have I been doing'). Do you want to be able to shunt wagons for hours on end (in which case a port style layout would be ideal), or do you want to watch long goods trains amble through the scenery (in which case start saving for that big house). What sort of time period are you looking at? Do you already have a collection of rolling stock or are you starting from scratch? This will then dictate what sort of layout will suit you.

I often look for inspiration NZ railway mags and books like NZ Railfan (which is the only magazine I'll shell out money to buy, its just so damn interesting). Not necessarily for a whole formed idea, but bits of scenes that I like that can be combined into a larger picture. I seldom get inspired by looking at other peoples NZR layouts for some odd reason. I can appreciate the work that goes in and the level of skill, but it doesn't tend to give me ideas that often. For model railway inspiration I often go off shore.

I'm always reading whats going on in England, and to a lesser extent America. The brits are the world leaders when it comes to building locomotives and rolling stock from scratch, kit or modification of RTR products (more on this at some point in another post). The Americans in contrast excel at building a variety of different styles of layouts, and have a far better handle on operations. Locally I'm not sure where we fit in. Operations have never figured highly on layouts I've seen, but that may be because there's only really a handful of layouts in the country large enough to support this.

So I guess its a long way of saying that you should spread the net wide when looking for inspiration, and not just look at what others in the area are doing.