An O Gauge (and Gauge 1) Introduction

[John R Smith]

As I am very new around here (but I have been dipping into your excellent forum for some time) I thought perhaps I should briefly introduce myself. If this is the wrong section for such a thing, then the mods can of course move it to the proper place. I am now retired, after a career in local government here in Cornwall as an archaeologist and historian. I have had a lifelong obsession with railways and model-making, but although I have had a lot of professional involvement with tramways and railways as part of my job, I have not done anything on the model-making side for almost thirty years.

I started out with O Gauge, as so many did back then, with Hornby tinplate on the front room floor. “Back then” being the late 1940s, so you can see that dates me straightaway. As so many did, I progressed through Dublo three-rail to Triang two-rail and eventually to a reasonably realistic OO terminus to fiddle-yard layout rather than tail-chasing round and around an oval. My first taste of more serious O Gauge was as a member of a wonderful club in Devon in which my father was a leading light. We met once a week in the early ‘60s and had two excellent coarse-scale layouts – one indoors in the loft of a stable block, and the other outdoors along one side of the old vicarage garden. The motive power was clockwork and live steam, with largely pre-war rolling stock, and the whole thing was a period piece in itself and great fun. In fact, despite the steam-roller wheels and tinplate coaches, I found it a whole lot more fun than my OO stuff, and this lesson was not lost on me.

The next several years were occupied with university, marriage, divorce, guitars, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll with very little opportunity for model-making but I never forgot my true passion. It was not until 1974 that I was able to have the space and stability again for such a thing as a model railway, and this time it was to be in O Gauge and to represent a tiny part of the old SR lines west of Exeter – “The Withered Arm”. These days, of course, this topic is hugely popular and everybody and their dog seems to be at it, but back then it was certainly rather unusual, as indeed was 7mm scale itself. Most folks were 4mm disciples of Churchward and the GWR, with certain noble exceptions of course. Anyway, this is what I ended up with, along one side of my room (my apologies in advance for the rather poor quality of the photographs by modern digital standards) –

You should note that I was totally unaware that at least two other modellers have used the name “Maristow” for their layouts, and I did not in fact find this out until very recently. Back then you could buy very little for O Gauge, there were a few wagon kits but almost nothing R-T-R at all. So an awful lot of this layout was bodged up from scrap and old pre-war bits (like the station canopy brackets). I built all the track from Peco parts and balsa sleepers, and the platform starter was soldered up from rail.

 

The M7 30036 was a CCW kit (whatever happened to them?). This was white-metal, and I glued it all together using epoxy. Now, 42 years later, I can’t remember how I did the chassis and wheels, but I do remember that she had a Pitman motor and ran superbly. The buffer stop was Peco of course, and most reassuringly I was able to purchase some more of these from Hattons the other day and they are exactly the same! (even the packet is the same) Thanks to Peco for some stability in a changing world . . . I made the water column, but the stove was Mike’s Models (and I still have it).

 

So now you can see the other end of the layout, with the bridge as a scenic break to the fiddle-yard. It turns out now that I had built an O Gauge “micro-layout” long before the term was invented as the whole visible shebang was only five feet long. At the time I just thought it was ridiculously short, but I had no option as it had to fit onto my mantelpiece. Anyhow, it was a lot of fun and you could do plenty of shunting on it, although as there was no run-round loop two locos were required (we shan’t mention the other one, which was a diesel shunter resembling no known prototype).

Time passed, I ended up working on the real railway for a while and sold all my O Gauge stuff to finance something else entirely. More years of confusion and poverty followed, until I found myself in Cornwall and in my own cottage at last. Once again thoughts turned to model railways, and I launched myself into a period of experimentation. Several layouts followed, all of them short-lived and designed to test some theory or other. “Devonport Central” was N Gauge, modern image, and featured a hidden train magazine and sequencer which could receive and despatch as many trains as you could fire at it. “Resugga Lane End” was OO, and designed to test a diminishing scale/reducing perspective concept (so you started at 4mm to the foot at the front of the layout, and ended up at 2mm or less to the foot at the rear).

Forward to 1986, and my last model railway project. This time I went BIG again, and chose 10mm to the foot, Gauge 1. Back then, G1 was largely an outdoor railway, live-steam, model engineer’s scale. I wanted to see if I could do an indoor, two-rail, scenic G1 layout. This one turned out to be yet another crazy micro-layout, just 60 ins long but 30 ins deep, built on a cut-down plywood door –

 

This photo shows you the full extent of the thing, “Goonamarth”. It was a joint effort with my partner of the time, Kate, and she did a lot of the buildings and scenic bits. Into this tiny space we crammed a chapel, wharf platform and crane, a china-clay dry, feedstuffs mill, a blacksmith’s workshop, loco shed, crossing gates and wagon turntable. Tiny it might have been, but it produced a lovely set of angles for photography –

 

Here we see the pride of the line, 0-4-0T No 2 “Halviggan”, trundling over the crossing beside Lucas Bros Mill. In fact, in the background we can see Mr Lucas himself and his faithful driver, Eric. Back in 1986 there was nothing at all R-T-R in G1 that I could afford, so the solution was to take a Mamod live steam tank, throw away the chassis and wheels, buy an LGB 0-4-0 diesel shunter and throw away the body, and somehow marry the two up. A lot of soldering and bodging later, and “Halviggan” was the result.

 

Here we see “Halviggan” alongside the dry at Goonamarth. Jack the Shunter looks on. I scratchbuilt the crane, the wagons were Tenmille kits and the figures were much-modified Britains. Kate built the clay dry and the wonderful 60’ stack. The scene owes a lot to the Wenford Branch and Poley’s Bridge of course. If the picture might seem a touch familiar, it is because this photo is my sole claim to model railway fame – we got it published in the hallowed pages of MRJ No 20, in the Portfolio section.

More years passed, work dominated my life, we moved house yet again and the model railway got forgotten and packed away into boxes. Some thirty years later I found myself retired, living on my own, and thought it was high time I did something about all those dusty boxes. So in the Spring of last year I decided Gauge 1 was just a little too big and thought I would have another fling with O Gauge. I sold all the G1 stuff, bought a couple of yards of Peco O Gauge track and a few wagons, started reading RMweb – and well, here I am. Greetings from Cornwall!

John

[peter220950]

Hi John,

 

Welcome to the Forum, look forward to seeing more posts, from the photo's I'm sure it will be fascinating stuff.

 

Peter

[Phill Dyson (onslaught832)]

Superb photo's John, the old photo's of your withered arm layout Maristow just add to the charm in my opinion........they remind of those wonderful Bradford & Barton albums published in the 1970's.

 

Cheers Phill

[jcm@gwr]

Hello John,

 

Welcome to the forum.

 

Jeff

[alant]

Hi John,

 

Welcome. Your old pics look great, will look forward to your new venture.

 

Alan.

[south_tyne]

Hi John,

 

Welcome to the forum, what a fantastic and informative introduction!

 

Love the photographs of Maristow and particularly the apparent 'quart in a pint-pot' G1 layout! I'd love to see more of this if you have any further ones - so much atmosphere is packed into those quick glimpses of your work. Keep us up to date with your new project, I am a big fan of micro layouts in the larger scales, and so are many others on here, so whatever you have planned will have a keen following... 

 

David

[hartleymartin]

I remember reading about your Maristow Layout. It was an early examole 9f what we now call a "Micro layout." Im

[pwr]

Welcome to the forum John.

 

Was Maristow ever in Railway Modeller? Or was that somebody else's?

 

My 7mm layout is under Layout Topics but I am thinking of having it moved here.

 

You can get there from the link in my signature

 

Paul R

[jim.snowdon]

"Tiny it might have been, but it produced a lovely set of angles for photography –"

 

Didn't it just. I don't know if it is intentional or just the consequence of every being weathered in shades of white china clay, but the almost black and white quality of the pictures gives it a certain timelessness and lack of scale that makes it look real, with no features that shout "model" at the viewer. Well done.

 

Jim

[NeilHB]

Welcome to the forum John. As south_tyne has said can we have some more pictures of Goonamarth please - what an absolutely lovely layout! Particularly love the second photo of it with the loco on the crossing - perfection.

[3 link]

Welcome John,

 

What a fascinating intro, I am sure many of us have similar stories we could tell, especially with all the house moves and the various women along the way!

 

I have been into 7mm since the late 80's and the choices of kits we have now is just unbelievable, we have never had it so good, be it kit built or R-T-R.

 

I am not sure if you know already but there is a great exhibition at Bristol at the end of this month, well worth the visit in my opinion.

 

All the best,

 

Martyn.

[John R Smith]

Many thanks to everyone for your kind comments.

 

As folks seemed to like "Goonamarth" I will dig out some more photos and scan them for the Forum when I get time later in the week. The early ones of "Maristow" were done on 35mm and were pretty grainy blow-ups from a small section of the negative, hence the "look". Goonamarth was shot on fine grain B/W stock using a Rollei 2.8F, and the bigger format makes a difference.

 

And by the way, what did happen to CCW kits?

 

John

[ffayolle]

Welcome John

Very nice layouts!!!

[marc smith]

Hello and welcome to the forum John
Nice to see another Mr Smith among model rail fans!

Nice old photos - I too look forward to seeing pics of your future projects 

[Neil]

Hello John; I remember both layouts from their magazine appearances. Maristow impressed me by looking spacious but within a tiny footprint and after its appearance in MRJ I always wanted to know what the rest of Halviggen clay dries looked like; now I know. Also reading carefull it looks as though you have also been responsible for another of my all time favourites, Resugga Lane End. Would there be a chance of some photos of it appearing here sometime please?

[John R Smith]

Hello John; I remember both layouts from their magazine appearances. Maristow impressed me by looking spacious but within a tiny footprint and after its appearance in MRJ I always wanted to know what the rest of Halviggen clay dries looked like; now I know. Also reading carefull it looks as though you have also been responsible for another of my all time favourites, Resugga Lane End. Would there be a chance of some photos of it appearing here sometime please?

 

 

Great Heaven, someone remembers "Resugga Lane End". I can hardly believe it . . . .

 

There are photos, but I would have to scan them  - and I am not sure where to post them, obviously it could not be here in the O Gauge section. Your advice is needed . . .

 

John

[81A Oldoak]

John,

Thanks for posting the Maristow photos; they have atmosphere. I still enjoy looking at photos of layouts from the 50s, 60s and 70s.

Chris

[Neil]

Great Heaven, someone remembers "Resugga Lane End". I can hardly believe it . . . .

 

There are photos, but I would have to scan them  - and I am not sure where to post them, obviously it could not be here in the O Gauge section. Your advice is needed . . .

 

John

 

I'm glad to hear that photos exist though I'm not sure I'm best qualified to suggest which part of RMweb would be most appropriate to showcase them. My initial thoughts would be somewhere in 'Layouts & Workbench Content' which whilst usually for developing projects could equally well serve to show completed items.

[81A Oldoak]

John,

I would post them here so we can see your work under a single heading and avoid the unecessary faff of navigating around RMWeb.

Chris

[John R Smith]

Hello Neil and Chris

 

I will have a dig through my photos and see if they will scan OK first. This was a long time ago and I only have small prints which may not be up to much.

 

This may take a while . . .

 

John

[N15class]

Lovely model making, I also rember seeing them in the press. Looking forward to seeing more of your atmospheric pictures.

[Moxy]

 

And by the way, what did happen to CCW kits?

 

John

 

Hi John,

 

CCW went through various changes of ownership over the years, the last I heard CCW kits were owned by JPL Models of Tyldesley.  They don't appear to have a website, but they can be contacted at 129 Elliott Street, Tyldesley, Greater Manchester, M29 8FL.  Tel : 01942 896138.

 

Hope this helps

 

KInd regards

 

Moxy

[John R Smith]

Resugga Lane End

 

Well, now that you have twisted my arm I will show you the few photos I have of this layout. Remember, we are going back 32 years now to 1984, so a lot of this will look very old-fashioned and certainly not up to present day standards. It was also never intended to be a finished work, but rather an experiment or test bed to try out one or two ideas which were new to me. Resugga was nothing to do with O Gauge either, but as Chris says perhaps I should keep all this stuff in one place, so here goes. This photo will give you an overview of the project –

 

 

The whole shebang was stuffed into a plywood box, 60ins long by 30ins wide (5’x2’6”). This was in fact the same box that would later house “Goonamarth”. For speed of construction everything was stock 4mm scale OO RTR rolling stock and off the shelf building kits, and the track was all Peco Streamline. We just raided the local model shop and didn’t build very much. The front of the board was pretty conventional, with a small single-track terminus, a gated private siding to a clay works, and a mineral branch heading off into the hills just to add a bit of operational complexity. All of this was only made possible by adopting ridiculously sharp curves and using auto-couplers, of course. This allowed me to put the fiddle yard at the rear of the visible section, as you can see, which kept the whole thing very compact. The experimental part of the idea was to progressively reduce the scale of the Cornish countryside behind the station until we arrived at a higher level railway, which was a simple loop of N Gauge track carried on viaducts and embankments. The N Gauge loop was continuous and supported at the rear above the OO fiddle yard by simple wooden blocks. The second part of the experiment was to have no painted or flat back-scene, but to model the landscape of fields and croft in further reducing scale, all carved out of Styrofoam. Bear in mind that this particular overall view shows you the worst possible aspect of the layout and gives the game away completely – Resugga was always intended to be viewed from the front and at eye-level only.

 

 

Getting down to (more-or-less) eye-level you can begin to judge how well or otherwise we succeeded. A Class 25 is in the platform road with some china-clay wagons, and about to rumble out of Resugga Lane End over the road bridge and past the box. In the background we can see a Class 33 on the mainline TPO – this N Gauge loop was set up with an interval timer, so the trains just automatically ran past now and then. One thing I do regret now was using the Peco track with its ugly over-height rail section and toy-like appearance, but this was intended to be more of a sketch than a finished item. At least, that was how it started out, but then we really got bitten by the landscape bug and spent hours on the scenery . . . by the way, the date is supposed to be the mid-1970s, when we had 25s on the clay trains, after the 22s had gone but before the 37s.

 

 

I think that one of the nicest things on the layout was this signal cabin, built by Kate from the Ratio kit. It made up a nice little group with the railings, phone box and so forth. The viaduct behind is in fact only a few inches away but the impression of depth is quite good. Those are N Gauge sheep, by the way!

 

 

The 08 shunter rolls downgrade off the mineral branch and into Resugga. This is just about the worst angle on the layout, but it works out better than you might expect. That SR PW cabin up on the mainline looks quite believable, it is really the exit under the bridge which jars because of course there simply isn’t the space to get a realistic perspective.

 

 

Resugga was one of those layouts which actually did photograph better in colour than B/W. We are looking along the board at quite an extreme angle here, but the transition to the distance is still reasonably convincing. One of the things which make this work is the use of levels – the ground drops away behind the signal box and then rises up again to the distant main line. If everything had been flat the illusion of distance would have been far less effective. We must have used bags of Woodland Scenics!

 

 

We’ll take our leave with this final view - the Class 25 is in the station while a 37 heads a London train on the main line behind. The gated siding to the clay works is in the foreground. This is probably the most successful photo of the lot.

 

We had a lot of fun with this one, but looking back now it seems rather crude in some respects. Perhaps the best thing about it was the name – Resugga Lane End is a real place just over the hill from my cottage and is just a crossroads with a couple of houses. Back then, the idea of perspective modelling was not new, of course – Jack Nelson had done some wonderful LNWR dioramas, and the late Geoff Williams had made brilliant use of perspective modelling on the terrace housing at the rear of his “Aylesbury” masterpiece. What was a bit unusual was the idea of reducing scale from front to back which we used here, without any perspective modelling at all. There’s really no reason why one could not do the same in O Gauge of course, reducing to 4mm and perhaps then again to 2mm at the back.

 

Not long after these pictures were taken we ripped it all out, cleared the box and started “Goonamarth”.  Moving to Gauge 1, of course, forced us to scratch-build almost everything . . .

 

John

[Neil]

That's fantastic, thank you John. I don't think you need to worry about it looking dated. The composition of the scene is as good as anything that I've seen to date, the colouring is spot on and though there's interest and detail it doesn't look forced or overdone. It remains one of my all time favourites.

[ffayolle]

Amazing forced perspective!!!