I've been thinking I have been trying to run before I can walk, for some time now. I have been building up stock and buildings, and similar, for a layout based around Copley Hill in the 1950s (and will continue to build stock up as it is my ultimate aim), however the thought occurs that:

a ) I have very little experience building baseboards.

b ) I have very little experience making track look realistic.

c ) Scenery is not something I have done much of either, though I have made a few buildings out of card and similar, here and there.

d ) I've long thought about an end to end layout, but always gone for a roundy round because I like seeing trains run round.

But over the last week, I've been studying some old photographs of my dad's around the Sidcup area, and noted the sheer number of four car and eight car VEP (Class 423) sets that can be seen crossing the railway bridge in Sidcup.

That spurred me to look at a Google map, and see if the idea of making a layout based on Sidcup had merit:

So you essentially have a double track main line, with a station, railway bridge, and sidings just at the end on the right hand side. So that got me thinking. What about something like this?

Say you make it as two baseboards, 8x2. You can definitely get the front part of the station in, with the car Park, and perhaps the offices to the left of the car park and "Christopher House", the office block to the left of the station. So the scenic setting is on two 8x2 baseboards and includes the station, the bridge, and the offices, as well as perhaps part of the Sidcup station car Park and the old Metro Bar the other side.

The raised embankment of the Sidcup line would make an interesting change from the relatively flat layouts that can be seen on the circuit of this nature, and the forthcoming VEPs would allow me to backdate it to when I first started living in Sidcup, and can still readily remember some of the details and trains which ran through the station.

Either side of the two 8x2 baseboards would be a 6x2 board with four sidings to store stock. The advantage of doing Sidcup is that the majority of the trains were 4 coach and 8 coach rakes (from what I remember without looking it up), so you could have two VEPs at either end, four car rakes, in various states of grime and graffiti, and perhaps a goods train featuring an NSE 50 and some ballast wagons which could be swapped from either end.

It would look like it was actually running a real service while at the same time only using the bare minimum of stock necessary to give it the right look.

I've toyed with other layouts away from my main railway interests for years, but this one keeps coming back to the top of the pile, and the forthcoming Hornby VEPs seem like an opportunity to finally get off the computer chair and do some proper modelling for a change.

Your thoughts, as always, greatly appreciated.

Source: End to End early 1990s NSE?