As locos grew more powerful and trains grew longer, most early railways quickly outgrew their original terminus stations. Those stations that couldn't be expanded tended to be down-graded to good depots as new stations were built nearby. So it's no surprise that the Grand Middenshire Trunk is also building itself a new branch terminus:
The baseboard is a piece of 6 mm MDF, labouriously cut to size using a Stanley knife and steel rule, with thin wood bracing beneath due of the horror stories I've heard about MDF sagging under its own weight. The size is 32 inches x 6 inches, which is just narrow enough to use long coffee stirrers to operate the points and signals. These rods lie on top of the baseboard, but are effectively "buried" in the layer of cork sheet glued between the baseboard and the track.
Track is PECO Code 75 Streamline with electrofrog points. Despite the mishmash of wiring at the back of the baseboard (below), the whole station is a single electric section with insulated fish plates protecting facing points from short circuits and pre-soldered fish plates providing power at the rear ("toe"?) of every point. This means I can isolate the two outside sidings just by setting the point blades towards the central track.
The board includes a fiddleyard (below), which is simply a single cartridge that slides into place and has power supplied by a couple of crocodile clips. The cartridges are just strips of thick plasticard of the same thickness as the cork underlay. The biggest scenic challenge is how to disguise this unrailwaylike feature.
To do this I've built a modest goods depot to sit in front of the fiddle yard. The centrepiece is made from a Bilteezi LSWR goods depot, scanned and shrunk to 3.5 mm scale and chopped about in a photo-editing programme (although the traditional sharp blade on a printed sheet of card would work as well). I added some Langley architectural mouldings and strips of plasticard to give the facade a bit of depth, and made a plasticard tiled roof that would jut partly over the cartridge. The wall to the right (which is a bit bland, and needs something like a large advert to break it up) is just a sheet of plastic card with 3 mm scale brickwork.
Oh, and as if one uncompleted layout wasn't enough, there's also the 00/HOn9 Lough Down and Long Covid Light Railway quayside scene to be built:
Those coaches are actually 3D prints of Victorian EMUs: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volk's_Electric_Railway
Brighton's Volk's Electric Railway is of course famous for its customer care and good public relations:
Edited by Ian Simpson
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