A handful of us build and run an imagined Dutch polder branch line in a borrowed attic in the west of Amsterdam, and this is where I write down what the layout taught us, including the parts we had to lift out and build a second time.

Canalside is an attic. It sits under the roof of a narrow house in the west of the city, up a ladder-stair that nobody over fifty enjoys, and it holds an HO-scale branch line that never existed: a single track out of an off-scene junction at Oostwetering, over a canal, past a beet siding at Kalverzijl and into a three-road terminus at Grienddijk. We started in 2019 with two trestles and a plan that was far too ambitious. We are still on the first half of it, and the plan has been redrawn twice.

None of us are professional modellers, and the layout shows it in places we have learned to like. The trackwork at the terminus was laid by somebody who had never laid track before, and one joint there still wants a thumb on it in February. What the group is good at is persistence: benches along the knee wall, one evening a week, and a rule that nothing gets torn out in the first month of being disliked. Most of what appears here was written up a fortnight after the work, once it had stopped being annoying.

This site is a notebook rather than a guide. The measurements suit our boards, our stock and our climate; an attic in a drier country would behave differently, and another scale would need different answers entirely. I do not name the shops we buy from, the people who share the room, or the group we sometimes visit across the water. Nothing here is sponsored and nothing is for sale. Where a method failed it is written down as a failure, because that is the part I actually go back and read.