Welcome to Wednesford...
Entry posted by wombatofludham
757 views
First post on the new blog recording the progress on the shed layout.
Funny to relate, I first started planning the "shed layout" just after Bachmann announced their revamped Class 158, and expected to have it all done in time for it's arrival in the shops. Amazingly, Bachmann beat me to it when they released the 158 back in December.
I purchased the shed off eBay from a company in Bassets Pole near Sutton Coldfield, who delivered and erected it free of charge as I was within their 150 mile radius. It is of tongue and groove construction throughout, including roof and floor, although I did have to beef up the roof when two days after erection a typical Fairbourne summer typhoon took the felt off. The replacement Coraline corrugated roof has withstood 100mph winds which are not unknown in this part of Wales and has kept the interior dry ever since. I didn't insulate the interior, Fairbourne is fairly mild, I don't feel the cold and even though the shed is of really good, strong construction, it is in an exposed location and weathering gaps inevitably occur which would allow wind driven rain to penetrate any insulation which would then slowly rot the shed from the inside. Dry, foam based insulation would have further reduced the width of the interior, so I decided just to have a good 9mm Marine Ply inner wall screwed to the shed frames. In effect, I've given the shed a cavity wall, and to be honest I've been in there in January and February and it's felt comfortable. The electricity supply was simple, the previous owners of my bungalow had installed an electric feed that had a split circuit, with part of the circuit board fed via an RCB, whilst the indoor circuit was off a non-RCB feed although still equipped with miniature circuit breakers, so the electrician just tapped into a spare feed from the RCB fed circuit with an armoured cable.
"Wednesford", as it has become, has been a journey of compromise and adaptation. The space available for the shed constrained me to a nominal 12ft by 8ft shed (I say nominal as it is "nearest metric equivalent") and by the time the interior was lined out with 9mm Marine Ply, I ended up with an internal space roughly 11ft 6in by 7ft 8in, not the most generous of spaces. Nevertheless, with some planning, I could make it work.
Having gone through a number of plans, I decided on a simple, roundy-roundy with a bay to fiddle yard shuttle. I wanted to have as generous a curve as possible but with such a narrow area I decided the only way I could do this was to build a fictional station, on a fictional loop somewhere in the Dudley-Tipton-Coseley triangle (a sort of "Evo Triangle" where "Evo" doesn't necessarily mean "Evolved"...) served by a selection of trains normally routed via the Stour Valley route from Birmingham to Wolverhampton. The station was to have been rationalised in the 1960s after electrification and as I was planning a raised section over the sharp curve at one end of the station, the idea emerged that the tunnel was too narrow to allow two tracks with full OHLE and as it couldn't be altered to allow the clearances for twin track electrification, BR decided to single the line through the tunnel and rebuilt the station with a single bi-directional through platform and a terminating bay. There is precedence for this, singling of the line north of Stoke was considered when the Harecastle tunnels were found to be too small for OHLE clearances, although in the end they opened up the tunnels and built a diversion round another, and on the Glasgow Blue Train network a problem tunnel was singled to give sufficient height for the knitting. So, given a lot of traffic would be sticking to the direct route via Tipton, I thought a single track would be justified, and it has a lot of benefits as it simplifies access to the fiddle yards and allows a single track "drawbridge" to span the door opening, avoiding the risk of electrical problems and derailments. I could also build the station as a semi-island which would allow the track to be pushed out to the back wall allowing for a slightly more generous curve at the one end.
For me, scenery and setting are more important than being able to bumble about dragging a wagon around a fan of sidings. I neither get nor enjoy shunting. For me the joy of railways is the "continual passing scene" of a variety of trains moving through the urban, or rural landscape. So, such an operationally simplistic layout is fine for me. With the track pushed back to the rear of the baseboards, the opportunity to present the layout differently was taken. Most layouts push the track to the front and plan the scenery around it. With "Wednesford" you will glimpse the trains through the buildings, as if you were in a high rise looking down on the town. What was a necessity had become an opportunity. I also decided that the bay platform should be a separate electrical circuit completely independent of the main through line. I also decided that instead of having it run into a two road fiddle siding of it's own, one of the sidings should be a mini diorama of it's own. Thus was born the idea of the bay being used by a bubble car shuttle to a temporary wooden platform that had been erected by BR to replace a station which was too big, and needed a crossing keeper to man a level crossing, at the end of a branch that was due for closure but never quite made it. Shades of Sheringham in Norfolk!. The plan is the platform will be located in a narrow strip at the front of the fiddle yard with a low backscene behind it, allowing access to the main fiddle yard but giving a convincing narrow shelf modelling the kind of run down, barely maintained, heavily vandalised and rationalised scene typical of the 1967-2005 period I want to cover, and is the kind of thing most enthusiasts hate with a passion. Which makes it all the more attractive to me, my mission in life is to trigger those enthusiasts who think only tea urns painted green are worth any effort and expenditure so if I don't succeed in raising their blood pressure a few points I will have failed. Dereliction, diesels and decay should set off a few.
That's the intro to the layout. I'll be posting more as construction progresses, I've laid out the "townscape" on the bare boards to give me an idea of what I need to do and will be making a trip up to the Bettws y Coed Museum shop to buy some track tomorrow to begin track laying. Buildings are a mix of kit, ready to plant and 3d prints and I'll be describing the scenic work as I go along identifying some of the more obscure kits and buildings I've used, and some are really obscure!
One final point. "Wednesford" of course is a combination of "Wednesbury" and "Hednesford", and sounded suitably Black Country. I then found out it was the fictional Midlands town in a book called "My Brother Jonathan" by Francis Brett Young, which was made into a film in 1948. Great minds think alike.
-
3
2 Comments
Recommended Comments
Create an account or sign in to comment
You need to be a member in order to leave a comment
Create an account
Sign up for a new account in our community. It's easy!
Register a new accountSign in
Already have an account? Sign in here.
Sign In Now