[woodcote]

This will - no doubt - be a place for doodling and procrastination. However, the aim is to get my home/office track off the ground.

The space I have, the sketches I've made and track sections I've built and tested resemble Monte Carlo - unfortunately the Formula-E circuit. However, I want the look and feel of something more like this...



I do recommend you watching that 16 minutes of Murray Walker and some utterly magnificent saloon car racing.

I lived near Crystal Palace Park for a while from the early 1990s - nearly twenty years after racing ceased there. I walked along the southern perimeter of the park on my way to and from the 176 bus stop when I worked in Camberwell and then up the Anerley Hill side when I caught the train into central London for a new job. And I spent plenty of late afternoons and evenings enjoying the peace and quiet, the wonderful trees, the ridiculous dinosaurs and noting the tarmac when my older sister told me about going to the racing there in the late 60s and early 70s. They are good memories.

My Scalextric Sport Digital layout will be a vanity project - a place to test my cars, run some laps and have some fun squeezing somethings that will hopefully look nice into a small space. The narrow track, minimal run off, elevation changes and that big background of trees means the Crystal Palace theme works for me. I lived on Anerley Hill, so that'll be the working name. Reading Phil Parfitt's excellent history of racing at Crystal Palace, plus watching footage of some of the action is certainly getting my creative juices flowing. So here's some more Murray and another great saloon car race, this time from 1969...



The plan for the week or two is to put the track together on the flat in the kitchen or living room and test the whole layout for the first time. And then try out some elevations. That'll help decide if straights run side-by-side or on top - a double-decker. A track design is one thing, seeing if it works in practice is another.