GMRC - unbuilt designs

[Neil]

Whilst tidying up, I found a couple of layout sketches. They almost made it straight into the recycling bin but I had a notion that I'd scan and share. You may remember that I was one of the Cambrian Coasters from the 'Best of British' round. I think it's been evident from the series and what other teams have written, that we had to submit designs and shopping lists for our initial entries to the production company some time ahead of filming. What is perhaps less clear is that we also had to submit designs for the following round and the final such was the compressed filming schedule. I thought it might be fun to share what we proposed to built had we made it past the first round.

 

Blockbusters.

 

After a lot of head scratching we settled on the Beatles film 'Hard Days Night' as being both culturally and musically significant. Cynically it also allowed us to go shopping for stock that we could all find a use for on our home layouts. The notion was that all the modelling would be in tones of grey to reflect the black and white nature of the film but with a limited number of patches of bright colours to represent the cultural explosion of the sixties. So we would feature the Magical Mystery Tour bus in colour, the yellow submarine, and an AL1 in blue hauling maroon Mk1s as the Beatles train. Strawberry Fields park would be an oasis of green. Here's the rough plan.

 

All the other stock would be BR black steam and unfitted wagons in grey.

 

Susprise, Surprise

 

For our final entry we roughed out a OO rabbit warren, but with wild west cartoony scenery. We didn't get far with detailed planning but thought our scheme should give scope for inserting animations which we would come up with if we passed the first two hurdles. The surprise being not knowing where the trains were heading and cartoon style animated features.

 

 

With hindsight I'm glad we didn't progress any further as it was a/ tiring b/ a long way from home and c/ perhaps a commitment too far.

 

 

 

 

 

[noiseboy72]

We had to prepare plans for both semi-finals as well as the final itself.

 

Our unbuilt semi-final layout would have been on the theme of Myths and Legends and our plan was to create a derelict theme park set around the theme. We would have had the park's own railway running with western style stock around some run down fun fair rides, an edible gingerbread house, an animated jack and the beanstalk and a loading challenge featuring us loading a standard gauge wagon onto a narrow gauge truck and transporting it on a stretch of 009 track.

 

Our final layout idea was to do magic tricks with the trains! This would have included a magical train that changed from a steam engine to a diesel in a very short tunnel, Find the Lady with 3 identical short trains disappearing into tunnels and reappearing at random points in the layout and a card trick with the reveal being transported from the other end of the 3 layouts.

 

We very much enjoyed our time on the show and would go back in a heartbeat. We've also had fun exhibiting our layouts - we're at Mansfield model railway exhibition this coming weekend and were at Newark last weekend and had lots of interest from children and adults alike. We're open to further exhibition invitations for our heat layout, but intend to retire our semi-final layout as it's not really up to the rigours of exhibiting and has limited operational interest.