I have come to believe that having a connection to a railway that you're modelling is a key way to motivate yourself past the sticking points one often encounters during the construction of a layout. I have built several layouts, none of which have been my core interest, and none of which were able to captivate me beyond the initial period of excitement in them. I think for better or worse, the swing towards LNWR as a subject matter of this layout might have been some kind of unintentional self-sabotage - clearly it is a caprice and doesn't truly reflect my core interests at all - and so in order to give myself the best shot, I'm bringing the focus back to what brought me to the party: The SE&CR:

As an aside: I now feel very, very stupid for selling my SE&CR 4mm items a couple of years ago (and I am instituting a policy where I will not be selling any of my stock or components at all going forward - for precisely this reason) and I'll need to reacquire the main items. As part of this process and some potential demands of time in my personal life, I'm also settling on 00-gauge standards for now to get things actually moving rather than mired in years of track building, re-wheeling.

The clear and obvious inspiration is the timeless siren song of Holborn Viaduct. If this is starting to sound awfully familiar, then I don't blame you:

I'm somewhat fearful of re-reading how much ground I'm covering again, but the reboot of the above project into 2mmFS never happened due to the massive stock concerns. However, the setting still rings beautifully true. The name "Belle Sauvage" was a notorious inn adjacent the site of Holborn Viaduct allegedly named after a prostitute - and seeing as my version of HV will be an unadulterated Minories layout in an even smaller space, why not set it and name it thus?

What is truly wonderful is that the LNWR Coaches, Horsebox and locomotive I have on the go will work perfectly as a cross-thames service in an urban SE&CR environment, and the drop board configuration of the baseboard will allow me to finally model the Ludgate Hill bridge that I've always wanted to do.  Sometimes, these things just have a way of working themselves out.

Please PM me if you have a SECR P- or H-class!

Thank you,