Friday 11 November 2011

WLJR: Sands End (Part 2)


Light grey for roads, and or bridges, dark grey railway building, brown represents non-railway buildings. The orange square is the intrusion into the room, and the track is coloured green.

I drew a total of 18 versions of the track plan to arrive at the one you see above. Some of them were minor tweaks, others were complete revamps starting from scratch. The final one above is actually based on C. J. Freezer's Minories, and my first versions had station platforms at the right end, but these were removed as the plan evolved.

The reasons for their removal revolved around the limitations of the space and the practicalities of fitting in a crossover for running around the coaches when a train was brought into the station. There was also the thorny problem of how the prototype would handle the layout of the third rail at the crossover, because the train crew would need to get down on the rails to uncouple the train.

The solution, or evolution of the plan, turned Sands End from a terminus into a through station. No need for a crossover. To do this the tracks would run into a fiddleyard, but now I had to deal with not one but two fiddleyards and their storage. More I looked at this the more bothered I became by the solution, as it was very clear that the layout was becoming less and less self contained within the space that I have, and that operating it would require considerable effort to set it up.

Not a big issue for those who want to exhibit layouts, as this comes with the territory, but this layout was supposed to be a home layout. A wash and go model railway that would require a minimum amount of faff to start running stuff.



As my thoughts on the execution evolved I decided that Sands End had conceptually become something else, and in my mind I renamed it Worlds End. Above is a snap of the Templot templates showing the actual alignments of all the turnouts and tracks, which I started building.

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