Deadlines

What would we do without them? No layout of mine would be completed without the deadline of an exhibition and the Workington exhibition on November 21 is coming up quickly – just 25 days away. So, I’m busy working on my latest, smallest layout, Royston Vasey, which is a response to the Workington Club’s challenge to build a layout with a footprint of just five square feet.

As followers of “The League of Gentlemen” will know, Royston Vasey is a small village somewhere in the remote Pennines, notorious for its unfortunate attitude to non-locals. I find it ironic that I should be writing this after the noxious Nick Griffin’s appearance on Question Time but the writers of the TV series were lampooning our tendency to demonize or dislike people “not like us”, not endorse it.

Anyway, I’ve made my bed and for better or worse, my Royston Vasey will have local trains only…

It is depicted on a cold January morning in 1959 and the railway is struggling to provide a service after the overnight snowfall.

The “history” of the line is that it started as a mineral tramway to a canal basin. A mainline railway was built by the LNWR to replace the canal, which has fallen into decay but the tramway still exists, with a connection to the main line, which gives me an excuse to use the smallest locos in my stud, the Pug, Y7 or Sentinel, to shunt wagons left by the pick up goods.  It also gives me an excuse eventually to build a nice little industrial tank engine from a High Level kit and to use the Genesis kit to convert a 4F into Rowsley’s snow plough.

Any resemblance to the Parsley Hay area is not an accident.

The main layout is on two 2′ X 1′ boards, which sit on a table top. I will transport them by clipping them and the stock box together to form a sort of case, making something neat and small which can be carried to exhibitions on public transport. This is important because for the moment a medical condition prevents me driving. At one end, cassettes resting on a table top perform the fiddle yard function. At the other a swinging sector plate transfers trains from the visible line at the front of the layout to the return line which is hidden at a lower level underneath the scenery, and which takes trains back to the fiddle yard thus:

AJ couplings and carefully located electromagnets will allow hands-free shunting, so the railway can be operated from one end by one operator.

“Simples”!

As I was saying before…

Well, what a summer it’s been! Betsy has recorded the changes in our lives which were enabled by the development of the chapel but from my point of view the major benefit has been the creation of a fine model railway room, 10’6″ X 22′, plus a small workshop area. Taking advantage particularly of the advice of Bob Ellis, who has recently gone through the same process, it is comfortable, easy to keep clean and well serviced with lighting, power and Radio 3.

I also bought Belle View, Newport MRS’s GWR layout, which just happened to have the same track plan as I was proposing for Bradford North Western. This is now set up and working well, and will cut the time needed for the realisation of my dream of having a large ex LNWR system by years. OK, so some say I am cheating by using other people’s work but I wonder what my effective working life expectancy is? 15 years? A no-brainer for me!