How small a space can you get away with?

 You will have seen in these last few posts one of my basic tenets of micro model railway layout design. The desire to get a quart into a pint pot. I do not have the space in my house (or garage for that matter) to recreate class 1 railroading. Or even shortline railroads for that matter. So I concentrate on where products starts and finish their journeys. Industrial subjects. Places where things are delivered to, or dispatched from, by rail.

The layout where I pushed this to the absolute extreme was Hamon Deltak. Built in H0 scale, it was inspired by a heat exchanger manufacturer premises that I can see from my desk at work. A good few years ago  now (perhaps 2010) I witnessed several enormous heat exchangers being dispatched by rail for somewhere. 

Google Earth view of the Hamon Deltak facility

Old photo taken on a primitive digital camera of two of the huge heat exchangers

I tried to cram the essence of the facility into an APA box (a flat pack toy storage box from IKEA, about 27”x14”.  Certain elements of it worked, some didn’t. It was maybe a bit too small for what I was trying to convey, and my constructional skills were lacking for my first attempt with the box kit.

This was the entirety of Hamon Deltak 27”x 14”

 You should be able to glean the track plan from this image.
A single track runs through with a siding in each direction 

Another view of the layout in its box

The structures on the layout and the backscene were based on what I can see from my office, (to really locate things) Though not exact copies of the structures they definitely look like them. 

The important thing on the layout was the finished product, the huge heat exchangers. They had to be modelled. I think I may have made those first. They did have to fit through the doors of the factory after all. 

The model of the heat exchanger that started it all

I often think back fondly of Hamon Deltak. It wasn’t perfect by any means. But there was a lot I really liked. There was the challenge of distilling the essence of a very heavy industry into the smallest possible space, and then there was those amazing heat exchangers. They would look great in O scale. Wouldn’t they?