Hello everyone,
As 3mm is seen as one of the less common scales I thought it might be of interest if I started a new topic to document my journey to design and build my first layout, Newharbour West.
As you might have guessed from the name, Newharbour is heavily based on the former terminus of Bournemouth West. There is of course already a superb layout of the actual station, modelled in 4mm scale by The South Coast Model Railway Development Group. So with Newharbour I have instead set my sights of modelling what might have been had the station continued on into the '70s.
Having been included in the electrification project of the 1960s Newharbour West represents the end of the 3rd rail from Waterloo and as such would have seen a varied mix of traction, ranging from 4-Veps and 4- Reps ,with the latter having split from their 4TCs at Newharbour Central, and diesel traction in the form of Class 33s and 73s. The station is also imagined to play host to services operating over the still open (but heavily rationalised) S&D, with long distance interregional trains worked by Class 47s and local services from Bristol worked by cascaded class 119s DMUs. The line to Salisbury via West Moors is also still open, although now only worked by Hampshire units operating a 2 hourly service. The line on to Ringwood and Brockenhurst has not been so lucky, having been closed and lifted.
The first challenge has been to create a space to house the layout. The garage was chosen and over the last year (somewhat delayed by COVID) I have had doors and a window added to the garage. I have then built an insulated room within the back 3/5ths of the garage, with the final room measuring approximately 11' 6" by 9' 3".
With the room nearing completion I've turned my focus to the trackplan and using templot have managed to come up with the following:
In the next few weeks I plan to finish the painting the room and get the floor laid so that I can begin thinking about how to best construct the baseboards.
I hope you have found this of interest and I would welcome any advice, thoughts or suggestions.
Happy modelling,
Rob