A Borchester Market layout appreciation topic

[manna]

G'day Folks

 

I still have my copy.

 

manna

[SteveyDee68]

On 20/07/2020 at 22:48, APOLLO said:

Glad to read Borchester still lives and is in working condition etc. I wish it's new owner every success.

 

Such an inspirational layout, I bought the mag dedicated to it back in September 1980, Model railways - Still have it, a bit dog eared now !!

 

 

Brit15

 

Amongst some of the materials Rob brought along to show me today!  The sheer number of articles written about the layout - wow!  And the trackplan is elegant enough to steal copy!

 

Steve S

Edited July 23, 2020 by SteveyDee68
Missing word!

[APOLLO]

I "stole" the name !!. My OO layout has three Borchester stations, (as they are all close together) - Victoria, Central and Exchange (bit like Manchester), also set in a bit later era (1966/7 'ish), and similar location (around Langwith - mine is a GC / GN joint line with some Midland thrown in - but there the similarity ends.

 

Frank Dyer and his layouts etc still inspires me today !!

 

Brit15

[Pacific231G]

On 21/07/2020 at 10:51, APOLLO said:

I "stole" the name !!. My OO layout has three Borchester stations, (as they are all close together) - Victoria, Central and Exchange (bit like Manchester), also set in a bit later era (1966/7 'ish), and similar location (around Langwith - mine is a GC / GN joint line with some Midland thrown in - but there the similarity ends.

 

Frank Dyer and his layouts etc still inspires me today !!

 

Brit15

Me too and I loved seeing it several times when it was exhibited by the Newhaven based group.

I wouldn't worry about stealing the name Brit. Frank Dyer almost certainly nicked it from the BBC and they took it with a single letter change from Anthony Trollope's Barchester in Barsetshire * (The Borchester near Ambridge is supposed to be in Borsetshire)

Apparently Borchester -'The Archers' version- is actually based on Evesham (though it doesn't have a  railway station) and vaguely in that part of the W. Midlands. Evesham was where the BBC has its engineering training school in the grounds of Wood Norton Hall so it would have been familiar to a lot of people working in radio.

There have been a fair number of model railway stations set in Borchester over the years.  I don't however know of any Barchesters, even though Trollope did give his Cathedral city a station on a branch off the GWR's main line to Exeter. That does seem rather surprising - A secondary GWR line serving a Cathedral City, what's not to like, and Barchester Cathedral also seems a good name for one of the GWR's proposed Cathedral Class Pacifics.

 

 

*As I wrote it (Frimley Parsonage) I became more closely than ever acquainted with the new shire which I had added to the English counties. I had it all in my mind,—its roads and railroads, its towns and parishes, its members of Parliament, and the different hunts which rode over it. I knew all the great lords and their castles, the squires and their parks, the rectors and their churches. This was the fourth novel of which I had placed the scene in Barsetshire, and as I wrote it I made a map of the dear county. Throughout these stories there has been no name given to a fictitious site which does not represent to me a spot of which I know all the accessories, as though I had lived and wandered there. (Anthony Trollope's autobiography)

Edited July 22, 2020 by Pacific231G

[mullie]

On 21/07/2020 at 02:50, SteveyDee68 said:

 

Some of the materials Rob brought along to show me today!  The sheer number of articles written about the layout - and the trackplan is elegant enough to steal copy!

 

Steve S

I still have my copy of the magazine and  read it or look through it half a dozen times a year along with my copy of the Buckingham special. I was lucky to see it at Central Hall when I was about 14. Another inspiration for me was Berrow which I also saw at Central Hall. Real inspirational stuff.

 

Martyn

[St Enodoc]

5 hours ago, Pacific231G said:

Me too and I loved seeing it several times when it was exhibited by the Newhaven based group.

I wouldn't worry about stealing the name Brit. Frank Dyer almost certainly nicked it from the BBC and they took it with a single letter change from Anthony Trollope's Barchester in Barsetshire * (The Borchester near Ambridge is supposed to be in Borsetshire)

Apparently Borchester -'The Archers' version- is actually based on Evesham (though it doesn't have a  railway station) and vaguely in that part of the W. Midlands. Evesham was where the BBC has its engineering training school in the grounds of Wood Norton Hall so it would have been familiar to a lot of people working in radio.

There have been a fair number of model railway stations set in Borchester over the years.  I don't however know of any Barchesters, even though Trollope did give his Cathedral city a station on a branch off the GWR's main line to Exeter. That does seem rather surprising - A secondary GWR line serving a Cathedral City, what's not to like, and Barchester Cathedral also seems a good name for one of the GWR's proposed Cathedral Class Pacifics.

 

 

*As I wrote it (Frimley Parsonage) I became more closely than ever acquainted with the new shire which I had added to the English counties. I had it all in my mind,—its roads and railroads, its towns and parishes, its members of Parliament, and the different hunts which rode over it. I knew all the great lords and their castles, the squires and their parks, the rectors and their churches. This was the fourth novel of which I had placed the scene in Barsetshire, and as I wrote it I made a map of the dear county. Throughout these stories there has been no name given to a fictitious site which does not represent to me a spot of which I know all the accessories, as though I had lived and wandered there. (Anthony Trollope's autobiography)

I'm sure I read an article by Frank Dyer that said it had nothing to do with the BBC. I'll try to find it, although that may not be for some time.

[The Johnster]

The Archers' Borchester is a bit southwest of Frank Dyers I think; there is often reference to views of the Malvern Hills and Evesham is not a million miles away.  I've always imagined it to be in the northern part of the Cotswolds.

[31A]

8 hours ago, St Enodoc said:

I'm sure I read an article by Frank Dyer that said it had nothing to do with the BBC. I'll try to find it, although that may not be for some time.

 

I think he wrote that he thought of it first!  May have been in one of his MRJ articles?

 

[Pacific231G]

10 hours ago, The Johnster said:

The Archers' Borchester is a bit southwest of Frank Dyers I think; there is often reference to views of the Malvern Hills and Evesham is not a million miles away.  I've always imagined it to be in the northern part of the Cotswolds.

Frank Dyer's Borchester is certainly a very different town from the one near Ambridge so he'd have been right to say that it had no connection to it; it's only the name that's the same. So who thought of that name first- perhaps both of them independently ?  The Archers was first broadcast in the Midlands in mid 1950  and nationally on the 1st January 1951replacing Dick Barton; I believe the original terminus version of Borchester Town was exhibited in the mid 1950s.  

 

Borsetshire is supposedly between Worcestershire and Warwickshire; Godfrey Basely who created it was brought up in a village near Bromsgrove in Worcestershire and it clearly owed a lot to his knowledge of the English countryside. Though set in a different part of the country, the development of the Archers' imaginary Borsetshire seems very inspired by Trollope's Barchester  and Barsetshire. In both cases you can't really shoehorn a whole county into the British countryside without being somewhat vague about its exact location (Philip Hancock's Craigshire was a remarkably small county and he 'reclaimed' it from the Firth of Forth and the North Sea)

Adding a single town, especially if its not a county town, is a lot easier*  and Frank Dyer was quite specific that his imaginary Borchester  was located where the real village of Kneesall is about ten miles North West of Newark with a credible railway map to support it.

 

The advantage we have over a long running radio series is that we can change our imaginary histories as much as we like without even citing rule one. Peter Denny went from somewhere like the real Buckingham to making it a cathedral city and Frank Dyer made Borchester's main station a terminus, then a through station and finally a terminus again. Listeners to the Archers will though be very quick to jump on the smallest inconsistency. Worse still, if you write a series of novels based on an imaginary place and they become part of the literary canon then  you can expect learned dissertations from American Universities analysing in minute depth, details that you wrote down without a second thought. 

 

*I believe that someone invented a very large imaginary town set in Buckinghamshire between Bletchley and Stony Stratford complete with a virtual University. The only change they made to the real railway map was to add a station on the WCML a few miles north of Bletchley. They named it after one of the local villages  which seems a bit unimaginative. I've actually visited the real Milton Keynes. It's a charming little village with a church, a pub called The Swan, village green and its own cricket team so thank goodness the imaginary "city" doesn't really exist.

 

 

Edited July 23, 2020 by Pacific231G

[bécasse]

I reckon that Frank must have started on Borchester Town before the Archers started on radio. By the time it first appeared at Central Hall in the late 1950s it was both complex and just about complete with a lot of hand-built stock. Frank was a professional model-maker but that doesn't necessarily mean that he was quick with his own modelling, Gordon Gravett was (is) also a professional but it still took him the best part of two decades to bring Pempoul to fruition even with some help from Maggie.

[The Johnster]

4 hours ago, Pacific231G said:

 

*I believe that someone invented a very large imaginary town set in Buckinghamshire between Bletchley and Stony Stratford complete with a virtual University. The only change they made to the real railway map was to add a station on the WCML a few miles north of Bletchley. They named it after one of the local villages  which seems a bit unimaginative. I've actually visited the real Milton Keynes. It's a charming little village with a church, a pub called The Swan, village green and its own cricket team so thank goodness the imaginary "city" doesn't really exist.

We’ve got a place a bit like this in South Wales, nice village with old pub on a mountainside with good views, but some idiot building an imaginary steelworks decided to make an imaginary new town to house its workers.  Cwmbran thus translates from Welsh not as ‘valley of the crows’ but as ‘abandon hope all ye who enter’... 

[Philou]

Ah, Cwmbran new town. Built at the time of MK, Stevenage and Basildump don. Why Cwmbran was built where it is I have really not much idea (not researched it but will do after this post). However, did you know that Basildon was originally built without a railway station despite the Southend line running through it? The idea was that the whole town would be self-contained with homes, shops, offices, health care and light industry all provided and there being no need to travel outside. Born, live, work and die there - utopia eh?

 

A station was finally built - but only in recent years.

 

Despite the unofficial moniker that I used above, the town isn't at all bad - though some of the architecture is a bit brutal - I worked in one of the industrial estates for a number of years as the County had a satellite office there.

 

Cheers,

 

Philip

 

Additional info: Basildon station 1974, Cwmbran station 1986.

Edited July 23, 2020 by Philou
Info

[BernardTPM]

I seem to recall Pitsea was the station for Basildon before the 1974 station opened. Is that right?

[The Johnster]

Cwmbran New Town, every bit as horrible as it sounds, was built on that site as it was intended to house workers at the then new Llanwern Steelworks, owned by Richard, Thomas, and Baldwin, who also owned the Ebbw Vale Steelworks; Cwmbran was about half way between the two sites.  
 

There were two railways running through the New Town, the North to West Main Line and the Eastern Valley Branch, with aconnection between the two at Llantarnam Jc.  The old Cwmbran station on the Eastern Valley line had been closed with all the other Eastern Valley stations in 1962, just as the new town was being built, and the town was not accessible from the railways that ran through it until a new station was opened on the North to West line, now called the Marches line, in 1986. 

[Pacific231G]

On 23/07/2020 at 16:28, The Johnster said:

We’ve got a place a bit like this in South Wales, nice village with old pub on a mountainside with good views, but some idiot building an imaginary steelworks decided to make an imaginary new town to house its workers.  Cwmbran thus translates from Welsh not as ‘valley of the crows’ but as ‘abandon hope all ye who enter’... 

Has the original village of Cwbran managed to retain its own identity?  Though I've not been there for a good few years  that was the thing about Milton Keynes village. It still had an identity separate from the new "city"* (stlll just a town for some unaccountable reason) and you had to live within the village boundaries to play in the Milton Keynes cricket team. The other odd thing was that in the countryside around the town of  Milton Keynes, a lot of signposts on the smaller roads pointed to villages beyond it but still hadn't been updated to aknowledge the town's presence  so it was rather as if it didn't really exist. 

 

*To be fair to the MK Development Corporation, preserving the character of the towns and villages within Milton Keynes was a deliberate policy

Edited July 25, 2020 by Pacific231G

[The Johnster]

I'd say so, yes, the original village of 'Old Cwmbran' as it is referred to on signposts is more or less as it was prior to the New Town's appearance in the early 60s.  This is because the Eastern Valley railway line, now largely overbuilt by road, had embankments and cuttings still used by the overbuild road that act as a barrier between old village and New Town.  The New Town's eastward expansion is to some extent limited by the North to West line.  Old Cwmbran's 'preservation' was never AFAIK an aim of the New Town development agency and the place is sidelined behind the New Town further up the hill and encroaching on the mountainside.  It has survived on it's own from it's own internal resources, and is not known to very many people, not so much forgotten as never remembered much in the first place!

 

Railway lines easily form boundaries in areas where building takes place after the railway is established, being by definition linear and a physical barrier needing level crossings or bridges to cross.  In Cardiff, which developed as a large town later in the industrial revolution than some of the industrial English cities., district boundaries even in the central areas are delineated by railways, and in the outer districts sometimes by railways that are no longer there and difficult to distinguish on the ground, but a linear development of newer housing is sometimes a giveaway.  The SWML is still a very significant geographical, social, economic, and public transport boundary in the city, and the Bay development has not successfully managed to achieve it's aim of 'reuniting the city centre with it's waterfront' because of this barrier.  The city was never united with it's waterfront, of course, so a reunion is impossible.

Edited July 25, 2020 by The Johnster

[Pacific231G]

On 23/07/2020 at 00:46, St Enodoc said:

I'm sure I read an article by Frank Dyer that said it had nothing to do with the BBC. I'll try to find it, although that may not be for some time.

I've found Frank Dyer's (excellent) article about Borchester Town in the December 1959 MRN and in it he does say.

"So the imaginary town of Borchester came into being (I couldn't help it if the BBC made the name popular a year after) Planning commenced in 1949." 

I'm not sure if that was tongue in cheek but it's very curious that both he and the original creators of the Archers should have come up with the same name at the same time completely independently.

 

The Archers first appeared as a week long pilot in the Midlands region in May 1950 and went national in January 1951 which would have been when "the BBC made the name popular". That would place Frank Dyer's invention of Borchester at almost exactly the same time as the Archers was first being written  having been in development following a suggestion by a farmer to the show's creator Godfrey Baseley for a sort of agricultural Dick Barton  in 1948.  Co-incidence or what!   

Wherever Frank Dyer got the name from it's pretty obvious that the creators of The Archers drew on Anthony Trollope's Barchester and Barsetshire when inventing their own imaginary county; BBC  scriptwriters of that time would certainly have been well steeped in English literature. So, I looked at 'Genome'*  the BBC's programme history based on Radio Times listings, to see if any of Trollope's  books had been dramatised around that time that Frank might have listened to but found nothing.

 

Although Borchester is a fairly obvious modification of Barchester or Dorchester and has been used for a number of layouts, in  web searches it only really come up with reference-sometimes oblique- to The Archers and to Frank Dyer's layouts .

 

Getting back on topic I have also found in my library several more of Frank Dyer's earlier articles on wiring etc. and they definitely stand the test of time.  Apart from MRJ  Has anyone ever listed his articles?

 

*Genome https://genome.ch.bbc.co.uk/  is actually quite good for finding out what programmes have been made about both railways and model railways over the years. I found what must have been the first appearance of model railways on television from the 5th August 1939 "A demonstration of locomotives by Col. R. Henvey, C.M.G., D.S.O., Vice-Chairman of the Model Railway Club." as well as a 20 minute radio broadcast at 7.40 on Sunday 12th September 1926 by Capt. T.B. Stoakley on "model railways".

 

 

 

Edited July 25, 2020 by Pacific231G

[St Enodoc]

8 hours ago, Pacific231G said:

Apart from MRJ  Has anyone ever listed his articles?

Off you go David!

[Pacific231G]

20 hours ago, St Enodoc said:

Off you go David!

I think I have all his articles in MRJ, not entirely by chance,  but my other magazines are a very mixed bunch.  Though  I'm picking up on odd articles here and there, a complete list is well beyond me. 

[St Enodoc]

2 hours ago, Pacific231G said:

I think I have all his articles in MRJ, not entirely by chance,  but my other magazines are a very mixed bunch.  Though  I'm picking up on odd articles here and there, a complete list is well beyond me. 

Well, I've checked my Railway Modeller index and there were no articles in there at all, so that will make your task a little easier...

[Pacific231G]

11 hours ago, St Enodoc said:

Pacific231G said  I think I have all his articles in MRJ, not entirely by chance,  but my other magazines are a very mixed bunch.  Though  I'm picking up on odd articles here and there, a complete list is well beyond me. 

Well, I've checked my Railway Modeller index and there were no articles in there at all, so that will make your task a little easier...

I'd hoped that someone might have already done this as has been the case for Peter Denny and John Ahern but this might usefully be  a joint effort. If we all add articles we've found, we should between us be able to generate a fairly comprehesive list. I'm not sure if this topic, relating specifically to Borchester Market, is the best place to do this or whether it needs a new topic. 

[SteveyDee68]

On 25/07/2020 at 16:11, Pacific231G said:

Getting back on topic I have also found in my library several more of Frank Dyer's earlier articles on wiring etc. and they definitely stand the test of time.  Apart from MRJ  Has anyone ever listed his articles?

 

 

Actually, @Chris_z provides a list on page 12 of this thread of all Frank Dyer's articles relating to his Borchester layouts, Hardwick Grange and his articles on wiring etc.

 

Steve S

Edited October 8, 2021 by SteveyDee68
Fixed layout name!

[60526]

Steve, can you tell Rob that the battery you were looking at powers this, the approach platform indicator.

If Rob doesn't understand anything, its best to leave alone until it can be worked out. Everything on that layout is there for a reason. I think you'll find some text in a 1950's article somewhere that the Borchester layouts were started late 1940's and preceded the Archers.

Regards Charlie

Edited August 29, 2020 by 60526

[kevinlms]

On 27/07/2020 at 08:21, St Enodoc said:

Well, I've checked my Railway Modeller index and there were no articles in there at all, so that will make your task a little easier...

Obviously that doesn't count the photo of Borchester Town that appeared in Railway Modeller for 1959 April page 98. It's part of a preview of the then upcoming 34th Model Railway Exhibition.

Edited June 12, 2023 by kevinlms
Wrong Month

[St Enodoc]

31 minutes ago, kevinlms said:

Obviously that doesn't count the photo of Borchester Town that appeared in Railway Modeller for 1959 December page 98. It's part of a preview of the then upcoming 34th Model Railway Exhibition.

No it doesn't Kevin! The reason (excuse) will be that if it was just a news item, as distinct from a feature article on the exhibition, I wouldn't have indexed it anyway. Even if I had, I probably wouldn't have referenced Borchester or Dyer in the entry.