I popped to Modelmania in Bristol today (my local shop, and well worth a visit!) for the first time in AGES today, and as usual picked up mostly what I went to get (loco crew, this month's Railway Modeller) but also got drawn in to an impulse purchase of a Cooper Craft Any Name Signal Box kit (No. 2008) because, well, it was ONLY £2.50 and I thought it was neat!

If you haven't seen it, the kit is made up of 4 sprues of plastic letters and a blank nameplate blank apart from SIGNAL BOX at one end, allowing one to make whatever sign you please, and shortening and lengthening is possible because of the multiple sprues.

The letters are 2.60mm high (my verniers tell me) and thus a little fiddly. At this point I wished, as I do from time to time, that I had a magnifying lamp, before remembering what was sitting in my living room....

At this point I probably need to explain that SWMBO is a micropalaeontologist by profession, who sometimes likes to work from home - hence the shiny, silly expensive microscope currently in my living room, and due to some of the work I did during my PhD, I know my way around a microscope too! A quick request for permission and I had at my disposal a fantastic tool for making very fiddly things much larger! It was still fiddly, but the calm that always descends over me when a ) I'm playing trains and b ) I'm using a binocular microscope and automatically slow my breathing to avoid blowing everything off the stage certainly helped. The first lesson was that Contacta in bottles with the brush is really gloopey, so that was replaced with Contacta Professional in the needly bottle. A short time later and I had the pictured signs ready for painting tomorrow when it's all dry:

Now to the quandary - I hadn't intended to buy signal box signage because I have scant evidence that Buckden box had a sign! Mitchell et al., 1991 "Branch lines around Huntingdon" (Middleton Press, Midhurst) does show a sign, but only in the shot taken once it had been removed from the site to a museum. There is one shot (44 in Mitchell et al., 1991) which PERHAPS shows there was a sign on the front, rather low down, in 1866, but it's hardly compelling, and in the 1950s shot (45) it doesn't look like it's there. So what to do with my nice sign? It definitely looks like there was never a sign above the door, and the evidence suggests in the period I'm vaguely modelling (late crest BR but with other stuff hanging on) it wasn't on the front. I briefly thought I could get away with putting it on the rarely seen Huntingdon end, but then remembered that one of my favourite photos of the box in Sawford 1981 "Cambridge Kettering Line Steam" (Becknell Books, Norwich and King's Lynn) shows that end in 1952 as 46400 passes and there's no sign of a sign. There ARE photos of other boxes on the line WITH a sign, so I don't think it would be too much of a leap to suggest Buckden did have one at some point?

Ho hum, I suppose I shall wait to see how good a job I do of the painting before final decisions are made....

Marcus.