Inspiration Strikes
Entry posted by S.A.C Martin
1,431 views
It all started, with a map drawn on the back of a lecture handout:
A very rough idea of a railway situated around a lake. I have always wanted to make a small, exhibitable lake railway layout for myself, but never quite known in what sense and what gauge I'd like to make it. I had had some very ambitious ideas for the layout, like creating a tank to actually put real water into, and using a wave machine to make it appear like a real lake...
At the same time, my ambitious plans for the Copley Hill set have put any ideas on the backburner. On the last incarnation of RMweb, I started a thread in which I received some wonderful ideas from the community as to what style the railway should appear in. I always receieved a few wake up calls as to the difficulty of some of my ideas, and for that I am grateful as it has made the actual conception easier to plan!
In short, while I had an idea of what I wanted on the layout, and how I felt it would be best to set it out, I had little idea of how it should actually look, whether it would have a real life prototype, and what gauge it should be.
That was before a flash of inspiration hit. Driving through my home town of Sidcup some months ago, I realised that there had been a real life prototype I could look at right in my back garden!
In the Sidcup and Bexleyheath area, there is a place called Danson Park. Here's a brief blurb from Bexley Council's website:
"Danson Park is designated Grade II on the English Heritage register of parks and gardens of special historical interest".
"It occupies 78 hectares of land. Records show that an estate at Danson has probably existed since before the 13th century. At that time the estate would have been arable land, pasture and woodlands".
"As Bexley's flagship park, Danson Park is recognised nationally for its historic landscape and buildings. In 2004 the Council successfully attained a grant from the Heritage Lottery Fund for the restoration of the historic setting of the grade I listed Danson House and surrounding area".
I started to consider this more after I realised that the park actually played host to a minature railway in the 1950s. The 15in gauge railway seemed nice, but was not what I had in mind for a layout. The lake and the surrounding area, however, being very accessible for photographing became a very tantalising proposition...
In the absence of photographs, here's a map of the area in question:
Now I'd done a little research into Sidcup's history before, and Bexleyheath's too, for a school project. Going back through my files at home, I found that I'd noted down a few "might have beens" for the two towns. Firstly, there had been a Paper Mill similar to that at Kemlsey Down on the S&KLR which had never been built. It would have been near the Danson area in the 1920s. Therein was the possibility of a need for a railway similar in style and setup to the S&KLR, but the with advantage of some beautiful parkland scenery. Add to that the history of Danson Lake and Danson lake, and a "might have been" 2ft gauge railway started to develop...
Bearing that in mind, I sat down to have a writing session. I wanted to flesh out the details of the fictional railway in its real life setting. In the next update I'll outline how my ideas developed into a fictional history for the fictional railway...
Until next time!
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