WLJR: Sands End (Part 5): The End

 Left end of the layout with the tracks for the goods shed and the coal line and the main line exit to the fiddle yard.

Middle left showing the mileage yard and the main junction for all the yard entrances.

Middle right with the entry to the mileage yard with the unbuilt turntable and loco shed lines.

Far right end showing the exit to the fiddle yard with the both the back and front yard leads.

An overall view looking along the layout.

How it all began...

... with a few wagons and locomotive put down to see how it all fitted together. How it all ended...

... with a bit of a whimper. Either way, end of the line for Sands End.

WLJR: Sands End (Part 4)

Continuing on from last time. Here is a shot of me laying out the Woodland Scenic track foam base for the goods depot and coal line for Sands End.



Here is the track being built, which I showed in the last post, but now including the cross-over and the three siding that will make up the mileage yard.



The adjoining middle board junction is here showing how the turnouts relate to the mileage yard throat and the lead tracks to the turntable that I planned on having.



Here is view looking from the East end towards the West end of the layout in the far distance showing the progress I had made.

And now looking from the East end towards the West. The piece of track suspended over the middle here represents where I planned to put a road bridge.



Here is a view looking at the mileage yard giving an idea of the capacity.



And here is a shot of my GWR pannier converted to P4 with Ultrascale drop-in wheelsets pulling a string of coal trucks from the coal line.



My Cambrian SR 25ton Pill Box brake van rebuild that appears on the CLAG site with a Bullied Q1 Austerity 0-6-0 good engine that I have converted to P4 with Alan Gibson wheels to P4.

The final part to come in due course.

WLJR: Sands End (Part 3)

The Sands End project was my biggest learning curve to date for modelling as I did something I've never done before and that was to make track. I started by staining sleepers.


I then use a wonderful programme called Templot to create templates for all the custom turnouts that Sands End required. Here you can see the templates with the stained sleepers held down by double-sided sticky tape.

I then used turnout kits by Exactoscale as components for the turnouts I needed, as I wanted to make them according the Great Western Railway standards, and the Exactoscale turnout kits follow LNER/BR Eastern region practice.

Here is a close up of me making a crossover where I have added running check rails that go throughout the turnout.

I then progressed onto the main junction that involved building four slightly overlapped adjoining turnouts as can be seen here.

 

However, the compound turnout and double slip were beyond my skill levels, but I managed to get Tony from CLAG to build me them, and I weathered some wagons for him.

The double slip and compound turnout were made using ply and rivets, whereas I made all my turnouts using chairs glued to ply sleepers. Therefore I ended up gluing chairs to both individually after the event.

This next picture shows a work in progress and the order in which I built the turnouts. Here I was looking down the rails to check alignment through the pair of turnouts.

More to come.

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.

WLJR: Sands End (Part 1)

Back to the Beginning

It all happened after taking my Godson to the Bluebell Railway for a “Thomas the tank engine day”. I was bought a Hornby Terrier by my partner, because I went "oh look at that cute little engine, isn't it so pretty in bright Malachite green".  Inexorably this led to getting a brake van to go with it, and then some wagons so that I could look at it on the shelf and not think how forlorn it look all by itself.

Then the inevitable happened.

I realised that British outline wagons were half the size of American freight cares, and therefore I could run trains that had twice as many wagons in them on a layout in the space I had planned to build an American interurban line in, or so I thought.

Then I started looking at the Hornby Bulleid light Pacific, and remembered that when I was younger that this was my favourite passenger locomotive. It just looked so sleek. In my mind it has a retro-futuristic feel to it "yesterday's locomotive of tomorrow" if you like?

So I found myself being drawn back into British outline.

Protofour

Initially I resisted the idea of using Protofour standards, I had learnt my lesson from the past, and I also knew that it would involve me building track.

At the time I had been stalled trying to build a layout based on the Petaluma & Santa Rosa Electric Railway that require making what I thought at the time was a complicated crossing through a turnout configuration. This track formation was required to make the plan have some resemblance to the location in downtown Santa Rosa, in Sonoma county, California. 

Unfortunately, I/we went along to one of the Scaleforum shows, and I was reminded why I originally changed to these standards, because the wheels and track look lovely. Some nice people at the Exactoscale (Hi Len, Hi Andrew) stand promised that there would soon be easy to build turnouts and that making track wasn't all that hard, honest "guvnor".

As they say, ignorance is bliss...

Down by the River

As the estate agents say, location is everything, and for me choosing the right location for my new P4 British layout was of tantamount importance to me. I had to model somewhere I could legitimately run Bulleid Pacific's and yet be small enough that it would fit along the twelve-foot wall that I had for my layout. A lot of ideas were examined, before being discarded. Some nice prototype locations did commend themselves to me, and I even thought about a totally freelanced location at one point, but I find it easier to play with a real place than invent a plausible fictitious site.

I then read a mention of the West London Line, and I imagined something a bit like the Holborn viaduct link, a small, but vital part of London’s cross railway routes. However, what I thought was a small branch line that snuck around the outskirts of London, was I discovered later actually a major trunk route for an enormous amount of cross London traffic. Still, Bulleid Pacific's ran down the line like herds of Wildebeest on the plains of the Serengeti

Given that a double track mainline is no bad thing; I thought that by judiciously choosing a station on the extension line, I would get away with selectively modelling a compressed part of the line. At this point I would state that my aim was what I would call semi-purist i.e.: in the style of, rather than an exact copy of one place. Therefore I would have the London & North Western Railway buildings, and Great Western Railway signals, with Southern locomotives, which are the best bits after all.

Of course anyone else on choosing the West London Line might have said "why not model the Chelsea & Fulham, or  Battersea railway stations?" To which I would have replied, yes but they are boring, being as they are through stations with no turnouts for shunting trains.

The irony of being able to build a prototypical layout with no turnouts, when I had never built a piece of track in my life, does not escape me. How hard could it be?

Choosing a Time Period

I think this is critical to modelling a railway, since the appearance and disappearance of locomotives and rolling stock has an impact on what you see. Also, choosing a time period can really affect the appearance of your track, which was set by the railway company that built the line. Ironic huh? Never really into track, after all you buy the stuff in yard lengths from a suitable manufacturer and plonk it down on the board.

So there I am studying track and buying books on GWR track, and how to hand build trackwork. All because the track pretty much defines the type of chairs used, the style of the turnouts, and the time period will define the size of the sleepers, and you need to know how long things like sleepers lasted, as they could last a very long time indeed. Once you go P4 you are no longer in Peco country,

The choice for me came down to being sometime after the end of the Second World War, because I wanted Bulleid Pacific’s in Malachite green. So I initially thought circa 1945/47, but this evolved slightly as time passed, because I want to run specific Bulleid Pacific variants that didn't come into use until after the nationalisation of British railways that occurred on the 1st of January 1948. I think it is called “mission creep” in the military?

Transitional Liveries

I ended up settling on 1949 as the cut off date for my project, because this is an absolutely fascinating transitional period for British Railways liveries. It gives me the widest choice of livery options due to the time it took to repaint all the locomotives in the new corporate colours, which meant that there were a plethora of hybrid Southern/British Railways livery variations.

I can also judiciously choose to only model those variants that interest me, and ignore any locomotives in British Railways Brunswick green, as I think it is a rather dull looking livery, which IMNSHO I think rather spoilt the modernity of the Bulleid Pacific design.

Finally, it also allows me to have both nine foot and eight foot six inch sleepers, with the former being used in the sidings, while the later would be used on the main tracks, because if one is going to go to all of the effort required to hand lay track, you might as well have as much variation as possible.

The West London Joint Railway

Teasing Torments  

My first introduction to this line came from reading the section on the West London Railway in the book “London's Disused Stations Volume 5: The London & South Western Railway” by J. E. Connor, published by Connor & Butler Ltd.

Here I discovered that the West London Extension Line was built with L&NWR buildings, GWR track and signaling, but that for some odd reason or another the Chelsea & Fulham station had a GWR signal box. The West London Extension Railway was formed to take the West London Railway across the Thames. It was financed by both the London & North Western, and the Great Western Railways, who had a one third share each, while the London & South Western and the London, Brighton & South Coast Railways each took a sixth of share each interest in the venture. After the Grouping in 1923, the Southern Railway inherited a one third share from its two precursors. After reading this I thought to myself that this would make an ideal line to model as it would have all the advantages of having three of the four Group railways running trains over any layout one built.

At this time I imagined it would be a little bit like the Holborn Viaduct branch. How wrong I was.

Further reading came from the reference in the first book I read to H. V. Borley & R. W. Kidner’s book, “The West London Railway and the WLER” published by The Oakwood Press. This book gives a brief overview of the history of the line and really left me wanting to know more after tantalizing me with little snippets like; the line was six miles long with 11 junctions.

I then bought a second hand copy of “The West London Joint Railways” by J. B. Atkinson, by Ian Allen Ltd., which was published in 1984. This book is the most substantial work about the West London Line, but it focuses pretty much on Addison Rd., and the services to Kensington Olympia. This means that there is little description of any of the other stations and their operational details. However, the WLJR had up to 184 train movements every day, with lots of transfer freights across the river, with through passenger trains and local traffic too.

It was at this point that I found a map of Chelsea Basin circa 1916 with six tracks in the book“West London Line: Clapham Junction to Willesden Junction” by V. Mitchell & K. Smith, published by the Middleton Press. The Mitchell & Smith book is a collection of captioned snapshots with some maps. The map of Chelsea Basin showed a reasonable size yard with two triple track sidings, which split to go either side of the canal basin. It even had some of those turntable things for wagons. Inspiration indeed.

However, being a Southern Railway and fan of all things Bulleid, I want to run my models of West Country, Battle of Britain and Merchant Navy class Pacific’s, which means I'm going to be modelling  the 1945/47 period (later revised to 1947/49 as this was a transitional period for liveries that would allow for the greatest number of choices for paint scheme variations). Unfortunately, I then found out that Chelsea Basin had by this time become a 23 track yard, which made it a rather impractical proposition to model.

Finally I found some really good photographs of trains on, or leaving the WLJR in “Southern Railway Reflections. The London Area’, by T. Gough published by Silver Link Publishing Ltd. This was useful for me as it gave me a very good idea of what the train consists looked like, and the typical locomotives that could be seen on the line.

It appeared that the LMS used a nice selection of 4Fs, Super Ds, Fowler 7Fs etc. Whereas the Southern, while Terrier tank locomotives were thin on the ground (I have a model of one I would like to run),  appears to have routinely run Bulleid Pacific’s along the line, along with Q1s, and class W 2-6-4Ts etc. However, it really amused me to find that the GWR was limited to running all its freight trains with Pannier tanks.

So, I was sold on the line as the basis for a layout I could build, even if my initial expectations of what this line was like turned out to be wrong and that in fact it really was a mainline route around the outskirts of London for all North to South traffic. One other very nice thing though is that I live close to the line and actually travel along it when I go and see friends in South London, and it is fascinating to see how the line has changed from the time of steam to the modern electric services that run today.