Simon Moore Posted May 7, 2010 Share Posted May 7, 2010 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. Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
Recommended Posts
Archived
This topic is now archived and is closed to further replies.