The Fern Valley Layout measures just 1200x600mm and comprises of two independent circuits. It is loosely based on a provincial New Zealand railway town set in the later part of the 20th century. The layouts purpose has evolved with the products to become a showcase to display the range, something that it was not initially designed to do. It features some hills and a deep chasm and hopefully shows the difficulty of building a railroad through the rough terrain that is typical throughout New Zealand.

The layout is constructed using scrap packaging plywood, polystyrene and plaster of paris. The cliffs are pine bark and the trees are either dead yarrow weed or hemp wire wound. The scrub is foam rubber off-cuts put through my wife’s food processor while she wasn’t looking, and then dyed green. The trees and grass areas are dyed sawdust off the garage floor, sieved and dyed green. All the structures and accessories and most of the vehicles are my own 3D printed designs. I initially started printing in PLA with a $300 Ender 3 filament printer, and many of the structures are filament. Almost all printing is now done in resin on an Elegoo Saturn 4 Ultra 12k and I am slowly replacing the filament structures on the layout with better quality resin versions.