The notes below were penned before I renamed the project “Royston Vasey” and progress on this can now be seen in my “Posts” section.
Bottom Chapel formed no part of my plans for model railways but it is paradoxically the project I find I am working on. It’s happened almost by chance: Workington Model Railway Club have issued a challenge to build a model railway with a footprint of exactly five square feet. I have realised that this gives me an unexpected opportunity to make a model which I can easily exhibit, carrying it solely by public transport. This is suddenly important because I have recently been diagnosed with a medical condition which makes it illegal for me to drive. Although in the past I have benefitted from the generosity of friends for transport, I would like to be self-sufficient if possible.
Rough sketch of Bottom Chapel
So the plan is to build a tiny model railway which folds up into a sort of suitcase, about 2ft X 1ft X 1ft. Its design is derived from Iain Rice’s “Chapel Bank” and “Chapelfirth”, in his book “Model Railway Layout Design – Finescale in Small Spaces”. My model will be even smaller than his plans- the bottom of the range if you like, hence its name.
As far as possible it will use buildings I have already constructed and to set it apart
I was going to use Templot but...
from the mass of layouts it will have a snowy landscape. This is partly because I am entranced by the current beauty of Wensleydale (I am writing on 13th February, in the middle of one of the coldest winters for years) but also because snow should enable me to avoid a lot of complexity with ground textures etc. No need to spend hours laying neat ballast or planting grass because it will all be covered by snow but bare, leafless trees might present more of a problem! In my imagination it will be set somewhere in the Pennines, a small halt on the ex-LNWR branch to Royston Vasey, so will have local trains (for local people).
There will be a junction to a tiny exchange yard for an old industrial tramway, which brings some as yet unidentified mineral to the main line and to its original destination, a canal basin. Originally worked by horses, this tramway is now steam powered. Initially I will use some of the small shunting locos from Clecklewyke, such as the Sentinel, but it also gives me an excuse to build one of the lovely High Level kits for industrial locos.
I struggled for a long time to get the plan right. Being small there have to be compromises (sounds like the story of my life…). I particularly liked the road running from the front, across a level crossing, with a group of cottages and chapel behind the station. The problem was the height required for the kick-back line. The 1ft depth pf the layout meant that the houses and chapel had to be above it but this introduced too steep a gradient for the road. The eureka moment came when I thought of adding a gradient along the main line, which drops from left to righht, and on the kick-bank line which drops from right to left. This makes the kick-back line 2 inches below the main line where the houses are, so the road only needs to rise about 1.5 inches.
I also would have liked to adopt a less geometric shape, like Iain’s Hepton Wharf or his “Chapel” designs but the need to make it fold on itself to create the portable brief case shape means it has to be a rectangle. I will reduce this effect by having a curved back-scene.
Of course, there is another Bottom Chapel project but that comes under Betsy’s “real life”. See http://bottomchapel.wordpress.com/ but progress on the model Bottom Chapel can be found in the “Posts” section of this blog, which I am updating irregularly as time permits.
