In the overcrowded UK with our often small houses it's very rare that a whole room can be taken over to run a nice roundy-roundy model railway.
One of the problems this presents is that we are not able to run-in our latest purchases very easily, a compact end-to-end portable branchline or industrial complex not being ideal for such unless one wishes to go totally mad shuttling the loco back and forth.
The answer might be to go back to those innocent childhood years of the trainset on the carpet in the form of a circle of track to allow ones pride and joy to run around for an hour or two in either direction to get the mechanism bedded in.
The only problem you might encounter will be the cat because they don't quite hold the same esteem for the finer detail we all expect on models these days. For shortly after this snap was take, Fleur took a swipe at the little locomotive – thwack! That's one of the reason for the blanket, firstly to avoid the paint being scratched as it hits the floor, and secondly to keep the noise level down on these fangled laminate floors.