The greatest layouts you never built (and perhaps now never will!)

[NHY 581]

6 hours ago, Steamport Southport said:

 

Have you been looking at my lists?!  🤣

 

Or is it just the fact that they are all good suggestions....

 

 

Tanat Valley. Got the three main engines (two bought cheaply second hand). One nearly completed until I found out there was a lot of differences between them, so put on pause until I can work them out. Started due to an article in Model Rail about ten years ago. Now thinking about getting that cute tank engine that sometimes appears in adverts on the forum.

 

https://www.nbrasslocos.co.uk/yoo4402.html

 

 

Ex GER Branchline. Bought some of those LNER things such as J15s and J70, the non corridor coaches and some early diesels. Waiting to see what the new 04 is like.

 

1950s Ex SR Mainline. Also being buying bits when on offer. Maunsell and Bulleid coaches especially. Got a few locos already. 

 

Thought about the ex S&DJR when I modelled in O gauge. Got a Jinty and 4F. Don't think I've got the space for anything more than a small layout for those now. But since the Jinty was altered to one Up North then it won't be S&DJR.

 

 

Always considered Welsh narrow gauge as well. I do wish they would stop tempting me.......

 

 

Jason

 

 

Morning Jason. 

 

Great minds think alike. The Tanat Valley is a recently 'acquired taste'. I managed to obtain a couple of pre built 2.4.0s and have a third to build, probably as 1196. 

 

 

 

Also 'in stock' is a 517 which will pad out the roster. 

 

 

A Dean Goods and all will be complete as regards the motive power. I'll just keep adding to the rolling stock as 1920s/30s GWR is very much out of the norm for me. ( not as far out as the current pre WW1 SE&CR project mind you.........)

 

It's more a matter of space. I can find the time.........ish

 

Rob

[Barry O]

I have had a few layout "ideas".. none have got much beyond the "idea" part...

 

Hinton .. C & O in transition days.. and yes I do have a fair bit of stock if I could ever build it.

 

Barnsley.. a joint station so every opportunity to run ex LMS and ex LNER stock into a busy station.i do have the plans for the station as well as a fair bit of stock.

 

Castle Eden in EM. A local (to my childhood home) station in NER days. Stock is being accumulated as is.. a track plan...

 

Yeadon.. a branch line which never had a passenger service and closed before the Leeds Bradford Airport started to expand. A more modern layout using diesels and incorporating a freightliner centre.

 

In the mean time I still have a portable 016.5 layout Cwmffyddl built by my late father and Leeds London Road to finish. We can but dream!

 

Baz

 

 

[RANGERS]

From a young age, Sleaford held a fascination for me, Joint line freight, ECML diversions and Skeggy excursions gave plenty of scope for a variety of trains and as the station changed little from the 50s to the 70s steam to blue diesels were easily accommodated.

 

20+ years of research, planning, building and collecting stock and other models  worked towards making a start and the shed to house it was at the point of being ordered, when a major health matter brought the stark realisation that I’d more years behind me than I’d in front, and taking stock of the progress made in the previous 20years, the reality dawned that it was already out of reach.

 

Since then, the focus has shifted towards my usual fare of micro-layouts, the stock has been drastically thinned out, I’ve dabbled with 7mm, there’s two layouts in progress and a fair chance both will be finished, and I  have more space around the place to build things rather than store them!

[Not Jeremy]

On 25/12/2022 at 10:26, Captain Kernow said:

A few years later, another (possibly more modest) project was mooted involving the three of us, something that I think I called 'Project Z'. Of course, nothing came of that either, but I actually built a point of two for it, one of which certainly ended up being used much more recently on 'Bethesda Sidings'.

 

Whaaat ??

 

You've used the Project Z points for "Bethesdal Sidings" - it'll never happen now - you great chump!

 

I think, since then, we have left out the final colliery "skirmish", is this because it may yet happen?...

 

Here are some of the elements, pictured a long time ago when the future was in front of us rather than behind us.

 

 

Seasons greetings etc to all

 

[Captain Kernow]

1 hour ago, Not Jeremy said:

You've used the Project Z points for "Bethesdal Sidings" - it'll never happen now - you great chump!

How's that for gratitude!

 

1 hour ago, Not Jeremy said:

I think, since then, we have left out the final colliery "skirmish", is this because it may yet happen?...

Well, I didn't want to tempt fate now, did I?!

 

[Brinkly]

This is such interesting reading. Thank you for starting it, Tim. 

 

I have a couple of grand schemes which I am highly unlikely to ever do. Since joining GWR as a Guard back in March, I spent a lot of time working over the former Southern Mainline between Exeter and Okehampton and the North Devon line out to Barnstaple. Before becoming a guard, I knew very little about the lines in North Devon.

 

One scheme I think would make an excellent model would be Yeoford. Having read a bit about it, it is a modeller's dream. Significant freight traffic being transferred out of Exeter to be stored there, along with the marshalling and re-marshalling of both passenger and freight services onto the respective routes out of Yeoford (North Devon, Bude, North Cornwall, Plymouth Mainline etc.). Several hundred cattle wagons were based there for the North Devon traffic. China clay and milk all being present on the line. Then into the mixing pot goes the beautiful range of former LSWR stock and model 1945, and you can have a few Bullied Light Pacifics in their gleaming post-war liveries. Not to mention empty coaching stock stored in sidings for strengthening services or those Saturday workings Dr Beeching put an end to. 

 

In a way, Yeoford is a massive shunting plank but with lots of through trains and stoppers passing by, immersed in rural Devon charm. Operate before 1954, and one could operate the Devon Belle... add Coleford Junction into the mix and oh... such possibilities! 

 

A more achievable idea is to build a layout scheme similar to Geoff Taylor's former Barmouth Junction empire. This would involve linking Horrabridge to Tavistock South, then, if room permitted, possibly making a model of either Lydford (although I suspect that would be way too big for any potential space I will have) or Launceston. The ambition there is the construction of both the GWR and LSWR sites. I can dream! I just need the space to achieve it. 

 

All the best,

 

Nick. 

 

[Tim V]

My original plan was to build Radstock GW in P4 (the proper one, not the later arrival), I did a lot of research, but finally realised that it was perhaps just too big. Ended up building Clutton.

 

Layouts I have toyed with are Pensford in 2mm with the viaduct, Tylwych (mid Wales line) in 2mm with the mountains around, Bilson Junction (Forest of Dean) in P4 (lots of wagons!).

 

Time now against me, so smaller layouts are being built ...

 

[PaulRhB]

I’m another who’s dabbled in US layouts and this was a bedroom design before I discovered modules that allowed me to run the even bigger type layouts I’d designed. Unfortunately those plans are lost but we were going to build a 40x15ft US layout at a friends place. 
 

 

 

 

 

 

[PaulRhB]

And a RhB bedroom layout that was actually designed for a friend before he got married and has sat in the I might one day pile 

 

 

 

 

 

[Michael Edge]

I think I planned to build a model of Liverpool Central when I was still at school - and using it regularly to get to Manchester. It went through many versions and drawings, this was the most recent one with the track drawn properly.

It's drawn here both to full scale length and shortened somewhat, it was a very small cramped city terminus. The exit from the station is straight into tunnel and long trains had to be shunted up into it to release the loco. It would also have had the Mersey Railway station under the wide long platform - where it still is although the rest has long gone.

What became Herculaneum Dock was originally drawn up more than 50 years ago to be an extension to this layout, the reason why it wasn't built was that I thought it was more or less unexhibitable. The whole thing is in a cutting and the overall roof covered nearly all of it.

I have dozens more of these might have beens but this is the one I would really have liked to do.

[The Johnster]

Much of the evolution of my layouts is rooted in those planned but never built, and each of them has had a part to play in the success of Cwmdimbath, 5 years in and no sign of getting bored yet.  I was without a railway for many years following the breakdown of my marriage in 1985, and the unsettled lifestyle I took on perforce following it, and planning imaginary layouts (using pencil and A4 notebooks, scale 1”:1’, and some precut card curve templates) was my main connection to a hobby that was otherwise entirely celebral.   Had a bit of a breakdown myself and parted company with the club I’d been with. 
 

In my younger days I planned some pretty unfeasible schemes, too big with far too much going on to operate alone, an essential requirement.  These developed in time into two basic types, BLT and main line junction, which was effectively a BLT in the bay but would feature through running main line-branch and a small junction marshalling yard to exchange main line and branch goods traffic as well as it’s own goods depot.  I like shunting, and the idea was to be able to do plenty of this while main line through trains passed by as a backdrop.  Llantrisant and Llanelli were strong influences on these plans, but I was also much impressed with Chris Pemberton’s (have I got his name right this time?) North Shields, which seemed to me to get a lot of operating into a small space and where the high level featured, in his words in the MRC article, the ‘ebb and flow of the electrics in the background.  
 

Eventually I realised that this sort of ‘daydreaming on paper’ was getting me nowhere and getting in the way of planning for actually feasible layouts.  I was obviously going to spend the rest of my life in rented flats, and equally obviously never going to have the room for any sort of main line operation in any form that I would be content with, nor the funds to support such schemes even back in the 90s and noughties when stuff was very cheap.  This was a highly beneficial realisation, as was the equally clear one that DCC was going to be beyond my shallow pockets, because I could focus onn various forms of BLTs, and a common theme began to emerge. 
 

This had been actually going on quietly in the background for years and was already well established.  It had to be South Wales, it had to be a terminus (these are actually as rare as rocking horse doodoo in the area, the line nearly always goes past the station to a colliery), there had to be an additional element to the basic terminus operation, colliery, coke ovens, harbour, or docks being the obvious ones, but Draethen had a limestone quarry, and it had pay respect to whatever limited space was available

 

I toyed for some time with what is still the dream layout, developed from the earlier main line junction concept and still on the backburner for when I win the lotto.  This is Crusader Yard, an alternative reality take on Crwys Yard, on the Rhymney in the northern innercity areas of Cardiff an the outer edge of the Rhymney’s Crockherbtown Jc complex.  Crwys is Welsh for crusader, and the name of a nearby pub.  It’s function was as a storage yard for coal traffic heading for Cardiff Docks, which would be left there by the colliery trips and re-marshalled into trips containing the mixture ordered for tipping into the ships and worked to the docks.  I overlaid a builders’ merchant with a loading dock, a halt based on Woodville Road over on the Taff Vale half a mile away, and kickback carriage sidings for the auto trains serving it based on Cranbrook Street a few hundred yards to the south, which had stable beneath them and a tall chimney ventilating them.  Judicious placing of Monthermer Road bridge well south of it’s real location and a ficticious road bridge replacing the Richmond Road-Rhymney Street footbridge, moved a bit north, compressed this down to about 7 or 8 feet, but it needed to either be fy-fy or a roundy, which meant a large and dedicated railway room; lottery money time!  I really liked this as a concept, lots of shunting and plenty of interest, and of course this was exactly my childhood stomping ground.  The first train I ever saw from my pram was by Monthermer Road Bridge and apparently I was hooked on the spot, one of the defining moments of my life.  When I got home, they said I started lining toy blocks up into trains with the black one as the engine and trying to push them along making choochoo noises; never looked back!

 

The introduction of the Bachmann LNWR Coal Tank and G2 diverted my attention to the Heads of the Valleys for a while, and I drew up a Rhymney Bridge-based end-on junction from the Abergavenny Tredegar & Merthyr, but, again, there were too many fiddle yards and never likely to be enough room

 

My living situation eventually settled down a bit with a decent flat that I have every intention of leaving in a wooden box, and things gegan to coalesce.  It’s two rooms anna bathroom, ground floor, living/kitchen and front room bedroom.  I could manage two sides angled into a bay window, and have since extended to a third, and there were two basic ideas, docks or valley terminus.  Docks were rejected for lack of fy space where I wanted it to be, complicated by the two levels, and I started looking round for suitable valley locations. The Tondu valleys were high on the list, and the initial idea was for Abergwnfi, rejected because the colliery was too big to make a decent fist of past the station and there were no goods facilities.  A schoolfriend’s parents had taken us for a picnic at Cwmdimbath some half-century before, and checking this out on the OS showed the trackbed of a dramroad leading up alongside the Nant Lechyd stream to the ruins of a small forge: we’d walked up to this back in 1966.

 

Cwmdimbath was therefore born as a concept, and shortly after that I skipraided some IKEA Lack shelves a neighbour was chucking, and it became a corporeal reality, the Lacks resting on top of bedroom furniture and felt tip trackplans soon cluttering them.  After all those detailed 1”:1’ plans that were never built, Cwmdimbath started ‘informally’ with the loco release headshunt for the runaround,(which is like building a pyramid from the pointy end down), measured to be a little longer than the largest locomotive planned, a Churchward 2-8-0T.  Track sort of grew, like Topsy, from that point (sorry) towards the fiddle yard, which works well because I have been able to incorporate gentle sweeping curvature and a feeling of some space on a site restricted severely by it’s geography simply by putting flexi down and letting it lie naturally where it fell.  It’s basically Abergwynfi with goods and private sidings grafted on to the loop and a kickback to the colliery.  There are elements of Nantymoel as well; but it owes much to layouts that never got built as well as to other peoples’ that were.  

 

 

 

Edited December 26, 2022 by The Johnster

[CKPR]

My plan until quite recently was to model the entirety of the Maryport & Carlisle in EM as it was it in 1976. By that date, the track layouts at Maryport, Aspatria, Wigton and Dalston had been severely rationalised with a couple of sidings at each one. In fact, the whole line looked like a CJF track plan and would have been interesting to work given both the then still substantial through freight traffic

and the very small yards at each station. I had plans to run it as both 1970s BR and pre-WW1 M&CR and I have the stock for both. Alas, the building allocated to it is to be demolished to make way for an extension to our house.

Edited December 26, 2022 by CKPR

[Mike 84C]

After many diversions and false starts, the first being an oval in the attic of my parents house but it ran and Hornby Dorchester's mixed it up with various Wills, K's and Bec kits. Then I moved to Wolverhampton and in the local model shop a Rivarossi B&O S1 2-10-2 with a vanderbuilt tender beckoned, I was in love! and on visits home it also mixed it up with the British locos!  After quite a while I decided I really liked the Pennsylvania, well you know what happened! But with freight cars and vestibule coaches.  Much later a friend sold me two brass, PFM I believe, White Pass & Yukon narrow gauge 2-8-2's and the narrow gauge bug bit rather hard! Built a layout in our attic which ran well, small son got the railway bug and I do remember him driving a brass T12  4-6-0 straight off the end of track followed by stockcars etc;  But made many friends in the Slim Gauge Circle which was good.

  Then the old marriage disaster struck and although I kept my trains I got pretty much cleaned out! Went to live in North Wales and did'nt really need models as I had 12" to the foot to operate and be involved with setting up a new railway. Ten years there and its time to move on and try marriage again which this time is very good but I have also met two guys who are very enthusiastic about  what must be the least known Colorado mainline through the Rockies, the Colorado Midland, think small 4-6-0's and 2-8-0's  three and four to a train over very steep grades, sharp curves, curved trestles (  Google Hagerman pass/ trestle). You can guess the outcome built lots of stock modfied some locos bought some brass locos built the layout in the garage, which son by now a grown up! ran more than I, there was so much track it was over whelming! So it festered, the narrow gauge stuff all got sold, the garage was made more useable and my lovely wife and I went on holiday to southern Ireland near Bantry which was the terminus of the Cork, Bandon and South Coast Railway,  does this feel familiar? A friend who lives in the area gives me a book  about the CB&SC and shows me lots of relics of the railway and I'm hooked again!  Our local club is looking for a new subject and Bantry in Sleaford Lincs is born. Four of us have built a twenty foot long Bantry which runs! I have own most of the locos and and stock the club owns the rest!  The layout in the garage was covered over and is now shelving/storage for all the stuff you put in a garage, I like to think there is one last layout and the spring has not run down yet but as my teachers often said "must try harder".

  Please take a look in the layouts section  of Irish Railway Modeller at what four, seventy +year olds, have done.

[darrel]

Mine was more of a daydream I have never had the space for it and it would have been rather big.

Glasgow Queen Street with the low level and the subway included. 

One problem with that would be the lack of models of the subway trains 

What period though? 1980s in my youth with class 37s and 47/7s or in steam days but then you would need working trams as well. 

Like I say a day dream. 

[Pacific231G]

On 24/12/2022 at 18:22, sir douglas said:

Arthur Heywood's Duffield bank, 15 inch private railway, just across the river from Duffield station, north of Derby. the main line loop is about 1400ft long in a woodland on the valley side with the shed and workshop down by the house connected by a 1 in 12 horse shoe.

 

map

 

horse shoe

 

Heywood's first loco "Effie" on the wooden trestle

 

Surviving tunnel (this is private land i got this photo from a website of somebody that explored the woods with permission)

 

 

 

Loco shed, the one on the left has just been finished and will soon go to Eaton hall

 

The biggest loco "Muriel" 0-8-0 articulated, so it rode like a 2-4-2, it is now "River Irt" on the R&ER

 

though this one is just a plain seated carriage, Heywood also had a dining car and sleeping car which the children often stayed in when rooms in th ehouse were needed for guests staying over

 

to do it in O9 (7mm scale) and to size, it would have to be about 35ft long and about 6ft wide and thats just for the main loop without the branch

Or you could simply model the Perrygrove Railway ! I know, because I've ridden in it,  that they had a reproduction  of the Heywood  dining car  and I think the seating carriage which formed part of a Heywood heritage train with "Ursula". I understand that this train  is now elsewhere but it was great to travel on it

With a length of 1200 yards, the whole thing captures the atmosphere of Heywood's Duffield Bank "demonstration" railway beautifully as a "minmum gauge" rather than a "miniature" railway .

If you can get hold of a copy, the reprint of Heywood's "Minimum Gauge Railways  is well worth having and includes side and plan elevations of the 16 seat "slam door" carriage, the 8 seat dining car and the four berth Sleeping car (complete with "yacht's folding lavatory")

If anyone wants them I can scan the diagrams from my copy.

Edited December 28, 2022 by Pacific231G
new information

[sir douglas]

the last i heard of Perrygrove a few years ago is that they got rid of their Heywood collection

 

ive got Mark Smithers' book and a pdf of Heywood's own book from gutenberg several years ago 

https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/44341

[PaulRhB]

4 minutes ago, sir douglas said:

the last i heard of Perrygrove a few years ago is that they got rid of their Heywood collection

 

ive got Mark Smithers' book and a pdf of Heywood's own book from gutenberg several years ago 

https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/44341

Yes Perrygrove moved the Heywood collection on. 
 

You might enjoy this 

https://narrowgaugeandindustrial.co.uk/products/heywood-vol-1

 

[Mark Forrest]

I'm still optimistic that my plan to build Wolverhampton Low Level (in it's early '70s guise as a parcels depot) is paused rather than being something that I'll never get around to.

Space limitations and not wanting to a build a layout that can only be used at an exhibition are the main reasons the project stalled.

I've got most of the stock (although most of it has 00 or EM wheels and the layout will be P4).  I'd got about halfway along the main station building - but there's a lot of detail still to add.

[PMP]

In a similar vein to @Mark Forrest I started work on one ‘bucket list’ project, New Radnor. I did quite a bit of research on it, and started stock building. After a discussion with a magazine editor, I wrote up the ‘ethos’ behind it, and why I’d chosen it.

https://albionyard.com/2011/12/25/new-radnor-stepping-stone-to-finescale/
 

Having done that I’ve subsequently found little interest in the project, at least in 4mm scale, as it now feels like I’ve built it, that part of the bucket list has a mental ‘done’ tick next to it.

[t-b-g]

I just enjoy doodling schemes, either individual stations or whole systems, that I know before I draw them will never get built. Designing layouts is just a nice way to while away half an hour and only needs a pencil and a blank bit of paper.

 

For many years I dreamed of building something a bit like Peter Denny's "Buckingham Branch". In some ways, I have by my involvement with the extensive layout called "Narrow Road" that I have built with my friend Ken Hill.

 

I always wanted something set up at home that was fun to operate either by myself or with one or two friends round, like Buckingham but I never had the room, the time or the resources to do it and I was involved with helping on other layouts like Narrow Road and Retford, so I had plenty to keep me busy.

 

Now I have the real Buckingham, the need to build something similar has gone away but the urge to build layouts is still strong. The passing of years does bring home the fact that the time available for doing such things grows shorter by the day but I like to think that I still have perhaps three or four layouts left in the tank. I have four started! Three are relatively small, very portable layouts designed for exhibition use, two of which can be connected together to make a larger layout. The fourth is larger and will form part of a garage/garden O Gauge layout.

 

None of them has really been touched for quite a while but I am just as happy sitting at the workbench building a loco or a carriage than I am building layouts so my philosophy is that as long as I am enjoying myself, if the layouts don't get built it isn't a disaster!

[PaulRhB]

1 hour ago, t-b-g said:

The passing of years does bring home the fact that the time available for doing such things grows shorter by the day

But the optimism that you’ll get it finished probably is better for your health than giving up as not worth starting 😉 

I think one of the greatest advantages of some of the grandest, possibly unrealistic, schemes is that they work much like puzzles do for others in keeping all the mental cylinders firing.
I doodled huge layouts to fill rooms, a 40x20ft barn at a friends place got us doodling G scale RhB, OO West Highland, HO American but we filled it with a large HO European layout in the end. It skirted the room as a giant loop with a large HO station on one peninsula, a marshalling yard on another short one across one end and my exhibitable Swiss RhB layout connected in to his HOm line on the other side. Just the process of planning opens up other ideas and getting involved in modular groups through the forum has lead to creating two of my own modular ideas with a few friends. We’ve ended up creating the sorts of layouts we dreamed of as youngsters, albeit temporarily, and realised those mad ideas 20-30 years later. 
Never give up dreaming, it’s good for you 😉

 

 

Edited December 29, 2022 by PaulRhB

[t-b-g]

1 minute ago, PaulRhB said:

But the optimism that you’ll get it finished probably is better for your health than giving up as not worth starting 😉 

I think one of the greatest advantages of some of the grandest, possibly unrealistic, schemes is that they work much like puzzles do for others in keeping all the mental cylinders firing.
I doodled huge layouts to fill rooms, a 40x20ft barn at a friends place got us doodling G scale RhB, OO West Highland, HO American but we filled it with a large HO European layout in the end. It skirted the room as a giant loop with a large HO station on one peninsula, a marshalling yard on another short one across one end and my exhibitable Swiss RhB layout connected in to his HOm line on the other side. Just the process of planning opens up other ideas and getting involved in modular groups through the forum has lead to creating two of my own modular ideas and with a few friends. We’ve ended up creating the sorts of layouts we dreamed of as youngsters, albeit temporarily, and realised those mad ideas 20-30 years later. 
Never give up dreaming, it’s good for you 😉

 

I haven't. I just dream a bt smaller nowadays.

 

I have a couple of very good friends who are both in their mid 70s and are working on projects that they would have to live to be over 100 and still modelling to finish. Roy Jackson was the same with Retford.

 

For them, the journey is the fun part. If they finished their layouts, they would have to start something else, as it is all about the building of the layout.

 

My ultimate dream layout would have been something like Buckingham and in having the real thing, I have achieved my biggest dream.

 

I still have plenty of "side dreams" and there is enough on my "to do" list to keep me going for the foreseeable future.

 

Even last night, as I was drifting off to sleep, another layout idea flashed across my mind!

[TheQ]

Ludgershall change for Tidworth. In EM.

Many many years ago I attempted ( twice) to model the civilian side of the station on a 6ft by 3, ft board in 00....

Trouble is the station is 900ft + long,  is double track, very wide platforms, two bay sidings and a coal siding.

Then I  wanted to build the above to scale and include the military side of the station. That's the other side of a road bridge, includes a Y junction, more platforms of 1000+ft several sidings inside and out of the Y.

In all I need about 32ft just to model the station..

The plans were made 20plus years ago,  and includes on the other side of the shed Collingbourne station which neatly fits on a 4ft long board to scale.... Except for two sidings of nearly 18ft long..... 

So I built a  53ft shed......

 

 

Modelled the base board for Collingbourne, excluding sidings in basic white.... 5 years ago

And that's as far as I've got...

Because I've inherited another railway N gauge, 15ft by 8ft L shaped, which I've extensively rebuilt with maybe another year to go..

 

I'm now reconsidering the future plans, I've discovered I like exhibitions , I like modelling, running not so much.. so what do I do..

The N gauge layout will be for exhibitions, and maybe Collingbourne also. But what of Ludgershall? It's so huge, will I ever get enough completed to be satisfied with what I've built?? Even just the civi side of the station would be too big for me at a show...

 

 

 

Edited December 29, 2022 by TheQ

[New Haven Neil]

On 25/12/2022 at 16:58, johndon said:

My current project may well take me the rest of time but the 'great project' would be Newcastle Central Station in the mid 70s with the bridges across the room to Gateshead shed on the other side, all in P4...

 

This is another of mine also, the river allows an operating well too!  I spent too much time on the end of platform 9/10 (as was) as a teen.

 

One that may see the light of day at least in part is the KWVR.  All of it.  Maybe when I have to give up motorcycling and there's more space in the garage.

[New Haven Neil]

@PaulRhB I have to say you draw a lovely plan!  Ever thought of a book?