The time has come to start thinking about the new layout... Over the past few years I've built up a stock of Peco Mainline HOe track and an even bigger stock of HOe locos and coaches... So the new layout will be back in my old scale of HO using 9mm track to represent 760mm gauge, HOe... Not sure what will happen to my TTe stuff but it'll probably get sold...
Now where to base the layout... Although probably 40% of my stock is Czech/Slovak I do have a fair bit of stuff from other countries around that area so I've decided to go Freelance but based in that part of the world so I can use the many building kits made by the small manufacturers from Central Europe...
I did think about several names, including looking at the list of fictional European names on Wikki (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_f ... _countries) and flirted for a bit with Ruritania from The Prisoner of Zenda but the trouble was that on the map of Ruritania it was clear that it was German based, though in the right area, and I wanted to use Czech/Slovak based place names... So I started to play with names in that area to see if I could come up with something suitable... As many parts of that area end in -ia I concentrated around that, many good ones have already been used and i didn't really want to have to fend off questions about obscure works of fiction/film/plays so finally ended up with:
The Kingdom or Ostrovia
Now there is a place called Ostrava, a major industrial city in the old Silesian part of the Czech Republic, but I wish to point out that Ostrovia, whilst having a similar name and located in the same area of the World, is not the same place, and any similarity of name be ignored!!
Ostrovia the country is a small country bordering on the Czech/Austrian border in a similar way to the way Ruritania borders on Germany/Czech border. It's about the same size as Slovakia and whilst it has a few smallish mountains most of it is formed of undulating countryside featuring fields with crops and livestock (with no hedges!) and the odd village and a few large towns. The main railways are through trans European lines from the north to the south or east to west connecting the country to it's neighbours. However for local use a 760mm network has been built up similar to the Austrian/German examples, and observers will note the similarities with Austria as the Leaders of Ostrovia in the late 19th century employed engineers from Austria to build the lines, hence the 760mm gauge...