The concepts behind the Chesworth layout are in two groups. For the club, the raison d'etre is to have a project that any interested member can join to learn, develop or show off their skills. Those skills can lie in baseboard building, track laying, scenery, kit building or even scratch building. All those are required for Chesworth. The club is also embarking on something new in that in its fifteen year existence it has not yet built a 00 finescale layout. For that reason the project is phased, and phase one will be a small section of the overall plan that will be taken to a high degree of completion before moving on to the more ambitious phases. The end result also has to be a layout which can be taken to exhibitions.

The design concepts behind Chesworth are to create a fusion of an accurate representation of a Colonel Stephens light railway such as the Kent and East Sussex with accurate representations of buildings club members see regularly as they pass through Horsham town. The layout plan is an end to end design which is to be operated as a "shunting puzzle", with the mixed trains picking up and dropping off wagons at wayside stations and industrial sidings according to instructions from one of the systems used to simulate freight movements. The general idea of the layout plan is thus:

The back story here is that the Sussex town of Chesworth had been left off the railway map despite the LBSCR’s attempts to close off every possible route to Brighton. A rail connection was not achieved until 1899 when the new Light Railways Act made possible a light railway from the town to the LBSCR main line at Gatwick Racecourse station. A single line was laid to a terminus in a part of town known as the Bishopric. The terminus was convenient for goods traffic but the proximity of a brewery, the town’s gasworks and the weekly cattle market caused complaints among passengers. Consequently a ¾ mile extension was built in 1905 to a platform behind the parish church. This became Chesworth Town station and the original Chesworth station was renamed as Bishopric.

Light Railway enthusiasts will see parallels between this and the efforts of the Kent town of Tenderden to get a railway, even to the extent of the citizens of Tenderden getting their railway but initially getting fobbed off with a station over a mile away bear the village of Rolvenden. Other K&ESR parallels are the cattle market, Biddenden's monthly fair provided a lot of livestock traffic for the K&ESR, but there is also a Horsham connection in that livestock markets were regularly held on the street actually called "Bishopric" up until WW1 and possibly later. Horsham was also home to the King and Barnes brewery until 2001 and, like all medium sized towns, possessed a gas works in the years before natural gas came in from the North Sea.

For operations this design offers a decent number of freight locations. It also focuses the requirements for rolling stock, much of which is intended to be kit-built even though the ranges of 00 wagons from the manufacturers is now quite extensive. Kit-building is however a skill some members have and others would like to try

If the railway parts have a strong K&ESR flavour, the scenic treatment is strongly rooted in the Horsham district. One challenge we will have is reproducing our unique "Horsham stone" style of roofing. Space limitations will mean that the brewery and the gas works will have to be generic, but the rest of the non-railway buildings are intended to represent real buildings in Horsham town or close by. The actual Bishopric will provide a pub and cottages dating from the early nineteenth century back to medieval times. One of the town's former water mills - now redeveloped as an apartment block - is also slated for inclusion along with some interesting town houses of a design not seen much elsewhere. A country pub in a clapboard building and either a half-timbered farmhouse or a watermill are proposed for the country area.

This then is the concept. Only Wimblehurst Road station will be tackled initially as a proof of concept. Construction will also start with the small stuff like buildings and stock, though with a club Open Day looming in April, some track-laying will likely be required before then.