The Model Railway Handbook

A free, opinionated guide to building a model railway that actually runs: the geometry, the electrics, the mechanisms and the landscape. Static HTML — no build step, no framework, no dependencies. Installs as an offline app.

Live at https://modeltrains.besthappypanda.com

Layout

.pages           bovine-pages-server config (enables the site, sets the domain)
public/          everything that gets served
tools/           helper scripts, not published

Bovine serves the contents of public/ — nothing above it is web-visible.

Deployment

The dev folder is ~/Documents/knitting site/model-trains, which sits inside a working tree holding three unrelated sites, so this repo is kept separate and public/ is rebuilt from it:

sh tools/sync-from-dev.sh
git add -A && git commit -m "Update site" && git push

Pushing to main is the deploy — bovine reads the default branch directly, there is no build step.

Things that fail silently

1. Bump the service worker cache after any asset edit. public/sw.js serves assets cache-first, so an edited stylesheet or script stays invisible to anyone with the app installed until var VERSION = "mrh-…" changes.
2. The repo name must stay modeltrains.besthappypanda.com. Bovine verifies domain ownership against a DNS TXT record holding sha256("owner/repository"). Rename the repo and the custom domain silently 404s while the pages URL still returns 200.
3. Re-registering the domain needs an explicit /index.html — the dots in the repo name make bovine read .com as a file extension, so the bare directory path 404s.

What is in the site

Eleven pages: the handbook itself (scales, track and plans, locomotives, power and DCC, benchwork and scenery, a reference desk), a repair bay that matches a described fault to its fix, a design bench with a sketch pad that exports STL, and an install page. Every diagram is hand-written SVG inside the page.