Hi all, and welcome to my layout thread.

Blackwell road (or more accurately Blackwell Road V2) is my first real attempt to produce a layout of P4 or 4-mm finescale standards. It's basically a glorified test plank, as i've a real desire to model a prototypical section of the Northwest LMR circa May 1974. But the layout will be exhibitable and hopefully that'll help me gain some much needed exhibition experience. By entering the layout here in RMWeb's 2010 layout challenge, I hope it'll give me a nice deadline to finish by, thus I'll be able to work on the next layout while having something to test P4 conversions and builds on.

Blackwell road was attempted before, with a wildly different track plan, but the baseboards were made for an '00' gauge layout and were not built to decent enough standards for P4 wheels and track. The name comes from a road near some allotment ground in Carlisle, although being a purely fictional railway. The layout will feature a small two road parcels only station and for the main part a TMD for the staple supply of Northwest LMR diesel locomotives. Class 40's (my personal favorite) and 25's will feature in prominence, along with 45's, 50's, 47's and 37's. But as this layout is designed as a testing ground for locomotive's converted to P4, most have yet to be built or converted.

The layout will be built for DCC from the ground up, and most of, if not the loco's will be sound fitted. I'd also like to try to make the layout operateable in both daylight and night time modes, with some sort of adjustable layout lighting.

The boards are some 12'9"long, by 18" inches wide (1854 square inches for the scenic area, 156 square inches for the fiddle yard cassettes, equalling exactly 2010 square inches to meet the RMweb challenge rules). Anyway, below are some photo's with the boards mocked up (last board needs gluing together) with a previous printed templot plan placed into position (the final plan is more or less the same).

With the non-scenic fiddleyard board nearest (not the top is in-set for the use of cassettes) and the two scenic boards covered with the previous plan in templot.

More of a close up on the old templot plan.

For a better sense of scale here is the plan with a couple of items of stock I've converted to P4; Mk1 GUV and Mk1 BG in the parcels depot and a Class 45 crossing the double slip from the TMD.

And here is a scan of the reduced sized actual plan, sorry for the quality.

Hopefully the plan has a nice sense of space, which is a major feature of real life TMD's both big and small. Choosing large B8 and C10 turnouts really helped this.

Anyway, tomorrow I shall assemble the final board. A little bit of wood filler and much sanding later will leave the boards primed for covering with spray-mount and then sticking the final templot plan down. Then I need to think about producing legs for exhibition, but the layout will fit on shelves in my room.

Regards

Matt

Source: Blackwell Road