Midhurst LBSCR Station 1866
Entry posted by mikeandnel
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Midhurst LBSCR Station 1866
As a member of the Brighton Circle, and a life-long railway enthusiast, I have always read anything about railways that I could get hold of, and the South of England railway companies were what attracted me to modelling .I started as a fan of the LSWR, transferred to the SECR and it’s components, and finally decided to stick with the Brighton from it’s inception up to the end of the Stroudley era. I have a few later ‘brown’ locos, but most are IEG or various green colours.
I have found the Brighton Circle magazine and forum to be a very good source of information and advice. The Circle has Stewards for every aspect of railway operation and someone has always been able to answer any question I had. I have also been through the records at the NRM and National Archive at Kew and learnt a lot more.
My concept for the layout is not strictly proto-typical, so there may be times when rolling stock may appear which would not have happened in reality, and this gives me the option to run trains from lines that were proposed to run to and through Midhurst but the lines were never built.
Trackwork
The track layout has naturally had to be somewhat truncated due to the room available but still gives a good representation of the original
The layout is being built to EM gauge, as that is the gauge of all the stock I have built over the past forty years. Plain track is SMP and turnouts are mostly custom built by me using copper-clad sleepers, but with two or three ready made turnouts from Marcway Operation of the turnouts (at the moment) is by Tortoise motors on the approach and exit to the platform road, and on the runround. All other turnouts are operated by Mercontrol using slide switches to change polarity, but the possibility of changing some of these to servo operation is being investigated.
Track is laid on a 3mm cork base and Ian has ballasted it to my instructions to represent shingle ballast, using a mixture (in equal parts) of Woodland Scenics brown and buff ‘N’ gauge ballast held together with Cascomite powder glue. This makes for a quite realistic ballast as can be seen from the following photo.
Operation of the layout is by DC Analogue as I don’t understand or have the budget to change forty locos to DCC, and takes place from where the scenic section ends and is done with two banks of switches, one bank for the track section power and the other using slide switches for the turnouts. The system incorporates a potentiometer to control the turntable speed
Turntable
This is from a London Road Models kit and was built for me by Simon. When it was installed I had a problem with being not able to see when the tracks were aligned, as it is ten feet from where I sit. Having joined MERG last year, I asked for advice on their forum and had a fantastic response from various members. A lot of advice and then Dave began asking me about various measurements etc., and the next thing I knew was that he had constructed a jig to replacate my set-up, had worked out an electronic indexing system and posted it to me from Rome. Then Tim got in touch and arranged to come and install it for me. Now I can run a loco on to the turntable from where I sit, press a couple of switches and the turntable rotates slowly until it is in line and then stops, so I don’t even have to be anywhere near it.
Wagon turntables
These were built and installed by Ian but do not rotate. (life is too short!). These are located on the LSWR headshunt, the entrance to the cattle dock and the back siding as per the map in Part 1. I subsequently constructed a walkway to join the three wagon turntables which allows the horse to negotiate the intervening track without tripping over.
More follows later
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