Evening All,

No report on Victoria Bridge this evening, but some further new layout pondering while stuck, Alan Partridge-like in a Travelodge.

In my last post I reported that a house move had, happily, left me with an office room with a long thin wall, or at least reasonably long in N gauge terms.

My current project is finishing and occasionally exhibiting my N Gauge Victoria Bridge, I'm also planning an exhibitable 2mm finescale (or with finescale elements) 'Wyre Forest' in the 1960s among other plans. For now, I'm keen to create something simple to run at home. For a while, I have been inspired by:

http://www.cornwallrailwaysociety.org.uk/hayle-wharf-branches.html The Hayle Wharf branch, which existed until recently as mysterious, crop circle like scars in the tarmac and abandoned rails glinting in the summer evening sun. Sadly, this was recently torn up, such it progress. Search RMWeb and you will find further fascinating threads on the surviving 'archaeology' and technical details of wagons, operations and other bit of inspiration.

My plan goes a little like this, I was playing with some spare bits of track over the weekend and realised I had space for a layout inspired by the scene, though shortened and squashed a fair bit.

(This clears up the mystery of why my 'Preserved' Warship on Victoria Bridge retains its full yellow ends, see the Cornwall Railway Society pictures)

I'm not going to be too specific with timeframe here. There might be elements of scenery that can lift out and change so the scene can skip from the fifties to the present day. As it is not a precise copy of the location, I'm thinking about extending the line a little further than what would have been the power station, incorporating a seaside terminus for passenger trains. This way the scene might be a fairly close recreation of the seventies shunting operations shown in the link above, or a more modern scene with my collection of Class 153s and the like shuttling back and forth.

This is where it gets a bit off at a tangent, I have been inspired by American outline layouts where you see trains winding through on street scenes. I'd been looking for an equivalent in the UK and this idea seemed to fit the bill.

Much of the track will be embedded in the wharf, which is also part of the picture in that I have a bundle of unused, coarse, but useful Peco N gauge track which I wouldn't use for exhibition purposes. At home, and buried in a road surface, it will look OK. The other arm of the 'L' shape will be a sort of scenic fiddle yard, but I may dress it up as a station scene. With a bit of an imaginative leap (not a long distance one) I might have a go at a model of St Erth bay platforms. As you can tell, the scene will have a tangible 'sense of place' but enough differences to need a new name.

EDIT: Also, if you look at the extreme left hand side you will see a mysterious shed at the end of the line, this will be a bit of a geographical leap, replicating the current depot at the end of Stourbridge Junction's bay platform, for no other reason than the usual 'my train set' excuse!