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Die Wominseebahn

You won't find a place called "Wominsee" on a map of Switzerland, but the fictional "Wominsee" is somewhere on the north ramp of the Bern-Lötchberg-Simplon main line between Spiez and Kandersteg. This line sees a constant procession of inter-city and international passenger trains, and heavy trans-alpine freight trains, the latter hauled by two or sometimes three locomoives.

This is my first attempt at a N-gauge Swiss-outline layout; previous efforts, also in N, have been of British prototypes. I'm still keeping all my British stock, and of course future British layouts can't be ruled out. Depends on what Bachmann manage to produce in the next couple of years.

Track Plan

The trackplan is based on Blausee-Mitholz, but straightened out a bit. It follows a typical pattern of a Swiss passing station with a long loop adjacent to the station building, a short loop off this serving a goods shed, and a couple of longer sidings. The facing siding on the far right hand side serves a quarry gravel loader (a Kibri kit). I haven't decided what industry the longer siding will serve. Crossovers at either end allow bi-directional working on both running lines; this can allow faster passenger trains to overtake slower freights.

Track on the visible section at the front is Kato Unitrack (Coloured grey on the plan - I may replace this with Peco Streamline Code 55 in the long term), while the hidden loops are Fleischmann Profi-Track (coloured yellow on the plan), mainly to make use of the curved points to maximise the length of the storage roads. I've used Kato Unitrack largely because I may well end up moving house in the next few months, and didn't want spend a lot of time building something which would only have to be dismantled again fairly rapidly. Kato Unitrack allows you to build something that looks at least moderately realistic very rapidly, complete with point motors hidden beneath the trackbed. And the track can all be re-used in future layouts.

There are quite a lot of compromises due to the limited (12' by 2') space available. I would have liked to have used larger radius curves at the ends; I've used the two tightest Kato curves, the 216mm and 249mm, and some stock will only negotiate the even tighter inner radius of the Fleischmann curved points under protest. The capacity of the storage sidings is also rather limited, with only 6 tracks, although the two longest roads can each accomodate two trains. I've used a mix of Kato #4 and #6 points; because a small minority of my stock takes exception to the #4s I've avoided using any facing #4s on the main lines. Those not familiar with Swiss mainline practices should note that Swiss railways have right-hand running, as in Britain and France, so the outer track is used by trains travelling in a clockwise direction, and the inner track by those running anticlockwise.

Rolling Stock

As usual for any layout, the amount of stock grossly exceeds the capacity of the layout. I've only listed the locomotives here, there are some 50-odd coaches and 120 wagons, from Fleischmann, Roco, Arnold, Minitrix and Lima