Greetings.

While helping at the MRS open day at Derby Silk Mill on Saturday, Dave Harris kindly dug out their archived plans of the West Bridge branch during a quiet moment.

At last I could try to resolve some of the mysteries about this little elusive Leicestershire station!

The plans were every bit as detailed as I'd hoped, and answered most of my questions.

It shows there were 2 lever frames and a signal frame, having one home signal to protect the crossing facing the up ( Leicester) direction, (though it may have been double sided!). This is the old red signal plate with white circle.

The plan also shows the buildings in the yard composed of stables and coal office, with 2 weigh machines - a conventional rectangular rollover one - and also a round one? One interesting point compared to later photographs is the absence of the office on the north side of the yard, near where the coal can be seen lying on the track. This makes me think that the office was moved or rebuilt at some later point,or an extra building was put up in 1893 as Twells suggests.

Nowadays a standing wagon is shown on photos, making me wonder if that was used as the original coal office.

It is not clear if there was an access yard behind the platform goods store, but it is possible.

The odd curved siding has a building alongside marked "store", and appears to have a heavily delineated line on the rail edge, as though there was some kind of loading facility. However, again this could be either way. It also shows access behind the building - too late for me now I've landscaped!!

At the stables end there is a water pump - presumably for the horses, which I am guessing were used for shunting and deliveries. (If they were transported, there must have been a mobile ramp as at Whatstandwell).

The hut along the track on the south side of the line is a platelayers.

The station masters cottage is not surprisingly shown as having outbuildings to the rear.

All in all a very useful exercise!

I also got to see the Midland Railway memorabilia, including some of the Roy Burrows artefacts.

And yto cap the day, the wonderful O gauge layout was operating a timetable!

It was interesting to see how work on this has progressed since my last visit to the Silk Mill in May.

Sorry - no pictures, too busy to take them!

Not much progress this past week or so on the layout itself, just a bit of redesigning around the level crossing to fit the side gates in.

Nothing is fixed as yet, just positioned loosely in place, and some more fettling may be required. The jury is still out on whether these gates stay or go.

The track has been resoldered and filed in places, and has not been touched up since, so doesn't bear close scrutiny!

BFN

Chris