Where Worlds Collide

I’m sure my luck is going to run out sooner or later. I realise that over the past three weekends I have travelled over a thousand miles by train, much of it by Virgin Trains, and not suffered any serious delay. And twice I’ve made the connection between the local train from Manchester into the Preston-London at Crewe despite it being too tight to be advertised as a connection. And coming back from Warley I managed to get a seat on a Voyager on a Sunday night!

Just about the worst problem has been outside Notwork Rail’s territory; the tube between Euston and Paddington. That bit seems to go pear-shaped every time I use it. What’s gone wrong with London Underground?

A bit of silliness at Stockport today, though. A minute before the train to Alderley Edge was due on Platform 1, the tannoy announced a platform alteration and that the train to Alderley Edge was delayed due to ‘the late arrival of the inbound service’. As the announcer spoke, a class 323 with the words ‘Alderley Edge’ on the front rolled into platform one, dead on time. After a few moments of confusion, the conductor confirmed that this was indeed the Alderley Edge train, and the station announcement was total bollocks.

Mainlines in Modest Spaces
Iain Rice
Atlantic Publishers
96pp

This is the sequel to the same author’s “Designs for Urban Layouts”.

This volume defines a ‘modest space’ as anything from a spare room to a single garage, and a ‘main line’ as a extreme provincial end of a route or secondary cross country line, giving as examples the Cornish main line, the Somerset and Dorset, or the Newcastle to Carlisle line, rather than four track sections of the West Coast Main Line.

The first four chapters are taken up with the philosophy of main line modelling, and the practicalities of building them in a limited space, with discussion of curvatures, train lengths and choice of gauge and scale. Sadly he concludes than 7mm is a non-starter; you can’t get “O Gauge”, “Main Line” and “Modest Space” in the same sentence.

Then we get fourteen complete layout plans for different scales and eras. Unlike the previous book in the series, this time the diesel era manages to gets a look in, with two of the fourteen plans set specifically in the post-steam era. Significantly both of these are in N gauge, while all but one of the steam era layouts are 4mm.

There’s a lot of emphasis on fiddle yard design in order to accommodate decent length trains in a limited space. Only a couple of designs use the traditional ‘oval with storage loops’ format. Instead, the author comes up with a variety of different ideas including vertical traversers and cassettes. Several plans feature steep gradients on the scenic parts leading to stacked fiddle yards, sometimes with an equally steep linking road to allow continuous running. Of course, we also see one of his famous “teardrop” style plans, with a steeply graded mainline in a teardrop shape fed by two fiddle yards, one above the other.

One things that strikes me is the relatively limited capacity of many of the plans. With a six road traverser or a pair of three or four road dead end fiddle yards, they only have space for half a dozen trains in a typical operating session.

Every one of these plans, just as in the earlier planbook, is set in a specific time and place. Some are based on actual locations, such as Luxulyan, Bodmin Road and Yeoford, while others are fictitious locations on prototype routes such as the Midland line through the Derbyshire peaks or the L&Y in Lancashire. The whole book is peppered with autobiographical asides. He tells us about trainspotting at Bodmin Road during family summer holidays in Cornwall with his packed lunch (“The up ‘Cornish Riviera’ used to appear at about sandwich-opening time”), and of his last sad sighting of an A4 pacific, filthy and battered hauling a humble pick up goods on the now closed Waverley route in Scotland.

Overall, while not specifically aimed at the diesel era modeller, there’s a lot of food for thought and inspiration in these pages. And the prototypicality of the plans is a far cry from the train set curves and cover-the-entire-board-with-track approach I remember from those Peco planbooks written by Cyril Freezer in the sixties and seventies.

Transport Blog have started a game of Mornington Crescent. The first two moves were Baron’s Court and Gunnersbury.

My move is British Museum, which, according to Patrick Crozier, is a legal move according to the Hepplethwaite-Everard rules.

The Warley MRC exhibition, held at the National Exhibition Centre in Birmingham, is the largest model railway show in Britain. It gathers together many of the best layouts in the country, and is also the occasion for manufacturers to showcase their latest new releases.

A couple of the most impressive layouts were 4mm scale BR steam era lines, both set in the Pennine Hills in the 1950s. First there was Blea Moor, a slice of bleak Yorkshire moorland with a stretch of the Settle and Carlisle railway running through it, served by a vast bank of staging roads hidden beneath the moor. The only thing that could have made it even more realistic might have been some cold horizontal rain. Then there was the Kendal MRC’s Askrigg Bank featuring a double track on a 1:40 grade. This is an unusual layout in that all four sides are scenic, with the visible track climbing though 360 degrees round the layout, then descending again inside the hillside on slightly gentler grade; the tracks actually make three laps of the board, two of them hidden inside the hill. Another very impressive layout was the 40 foot long HO scale Lorrette, a slice of electrified Belgian main line with some impressive scenic modelling.

American readers of this weblog my be struck by the difference in emphasis in the model railway hobby. I get the impression that the American hobby is all about big permenantly installed basement empires. In contrast, the really big and impressive British layouts are sectional exhibition layouts. This may be because British house builders typically don’t build houses with basements; in fact some layouts can never be fully set up in their owner’s homes, and only run at shows.

Yet again, Warley made a huge dent in my wallet. First there was the Kato/Hobbytrain Swiss Re6/6 Bo-Bo-Bo, released just a week before the show, a magnificent model that’s gliding round the layout on a train of container flats as I type this. Then I bought a whole load of British outline stock, several Farish VAA vans, and a Artrans grain hopper that I’m planning to convert into a ‘Polybulk’ china clay wagon. Worst of all, I succumbed to a complete HST set in First Great Western’s “Barbie” livery! And last, but definitely not least I also ordered a CJM 67. (“Why spend all that money on something that just sits there and goes ‘ying, ying, ying’”, said Roechard Wibd)

Shows like this are great gatherings of people. Nowadays I tend to keep in touch with fellow modellers over the net, and meet up with them at shows. Over the weekend I met up Alan Monk, Steve Grantham, Mike Hughes, Stu from Swindon, Paul Martin, Bryn Davies, Roechard Wibd, Natalie Jones, Kelly, Maurice Pearce, Chris Marchant and Fat Belly Jones, plus many more.