Lowerhouse East Lancashire steam 1960-1968

[Simon Moore]

I have been itching to start a thread about this layout for long enough now & i've decided to reveal the layout & a background about it.

 

Lowerhouse is a real location on the outskirts of Burnley close to Rosegrove which is the inspiration behind the layout. For sometime now i have been ammassing a collection of steam classes that ran in East Lancashire in the last 10 to 15 years of steam.

The collection i have has been worked on to weather them up & make them look like a working engine of the period & it's been a great learning curve when it came to weathering

 

Whilst it was clear the era i wanted to model the actual layout & plan wasnt i have tried various ideas with no joy & for 18 months i was struggling to come up with something that captured the whole area perfectly & also gave me something that would keep me operationally intrested.

Last year i came accross a trackplan book for finescale model railways by Iain Rice which had plenty of great ideas & then i came to the end of the book & on the final page their it was ''Navigation sidings''. The layout had everything i could want scenically & operationally & after a brief think i decided this was the layout for me.

 

Here is the trackplan.

 

Since the original has been deleted because of copyright here is a anyrail rough sketch.

 

 

The next thing to tackle was the baseboard which was beyond my basic joniery skills so a trip to the local modelshop sorted that 13 month ago . I can't say i am best pleased about having to wait so long for the baseboards & i am still waiting, but i have seen the start of them in the shop & next weekend i am going to finalise the last few pieces of the puzzle.

 

Trackwork.

 

Trackwork was one thing i wanted to look right but with space being to a minimum i decided to use Peco code 75 pointwork with SMP flexi to give the model a half decent finish & with reliability not having to be a issue. The layout will be rigged for DCC but using the older style of pointcontrol using a prob & stud.

 

Buildings.

 

I am lucky enough to be able to walk 5 minutes down the road & find the last few mills that are still standing in town. One mill that has always stood out was Bowling mill which is next to what was Chaffers siding & crossing close to where i grew up. The mill has a boilerhouse & water tank plus various other features that are crying out to be modelled.

 

 

 

 

I want the layout to be quite dark & dirty with a real industrial feel to it but with plenty of detail to capture the working sixties.

 

I recently did a mock up just to see how things would look on the mill end. The Bachmann boxes are buildings trrace houses & a pub whilst the Hornby boxes the loco & wagons is sat is represents the banking that cuts accross the layout.

 

 

I have made a order today of Wills kits which will be used on the layout so i am going to be busy with kits in the next few weeks .

 

Thats all for now.

 

Simon.