In the begining!.........Genesis, chapter 1

[BlackRat]

Folks this is great! Love to see more, wish everyone would join in.

 

Looking at my original piccy, I have been trying to remember what was what!

 

Builder Plus (remember them!!) terraced houses x 2

 

Merit poplar trees, (they came in a box of 3, 50p!).

 

Airfix platforms (10p a kit!!)

 

Merit gas lamps (still got those somewhere!)

 

Superquick farmhouse

 

Ratio signals (def NON working!)

 

Big lumps of Modroc covered in green emulsion from Woolies with bags of Peco scatter, green and poppyfield iirc!

 

Bag or two of Peco lichen.

 

Hornby system 6 track, laid on a type of ready to lay 'ballast' which was basically granite chippings on a sort of black bituminous base! Try as you might there was no way it would lay flat! I bought it from a shop in the highstreet in Ilfracombe whilst on holiday, sold lots of models but cant recall its name!

 

I hope everytone reading this is also full of nostalgia!

 

More please!

[Black Sheep]

There probably is a photo of my first layout, someone bought me a camera for my 10th birthday (fixed focus compact) and I was rather enthusiastic with it.

 

The second layout might have somehow escaped photographs as it was never really finished.

 

layout three is photographed in my blog and then dismantled before getting a track bed to be re-built in a way that will actually work

[mirreles31]

Hi Neil, bin pondering this one so I hope you are ready B) . My first layout was given to me by my Uncle, an oval of Triang track a couple of points etc on a fibre board base painted green . With 2 trainsets, I think one was called Freightmaster (Triang) a 31 with 3 wagons, also Princess Victoria and 3 blood & custard coaches (I was so enamoured by this I named my daughter Victoria he he .) Anyway this layout has photos but they exist in the world of my Dad's slide collection which incidentally came out as often as my layout did when I was a child ie not a lot . Second layout was an end to end corner layout and there the description ends cos I discovered the fairer sex.B) . Having got all that messing about out of the way, this photo carefully found for your delight is of 'Woodhouse Station/Junction Mk.1 (Mk.2's in the garage in bits and Mk.3 is well watch this Forum but don't hold your breath!):-

Bear with me now-on this layout are remnants of a past life-from left to right, a couple of Triang blood& custards, with a new at that time Ratio Southern GUV kit build. Coming forward a Mainline Jubilee 'Amethyst' (just got rid). Then Lima Cl.40 (dating this pic to 1988) the first to hit the shelves. Now she is D231 'Sylvania' (see my thread). In front of that is a pug of some sort ( a well meant Xmas prezzy I think!). Next is a home made Cl.20 (more anon.) & a Lima Cl.37 which I still have, it's got rebuilt valances and reduced body ride height. last but not least is the aforementioned Triang Cl.31 superdetailed to what was then my standards, I filed the flanges down to run on code 100 track Ouch!!! . With another Triang B&C coach. Right now we'll ignore the homebrew and baby stuff . The next pic, I took today, of the 'home made' Cl.20, and still extant!!!!! .

I havn't touched this in 20 odd years, it's made of card and balsa with a Craftsman detailing kit And some A1 models etchings & Lima bogies . Will I finish it? well......I've still got the 31 and my little Princesses that's the loco and my daughter . Cheers Phil.

[Colin_McLeod]

I love that class 20. Excellent.

[Stevie]

If only I had thought to point a camera at the layout that my father made, all I have left from the original is an R855 Flying Scotsman and this

 

 

Shame I'm now Dcc

 

Steve

[APOLLO]

After years of Triang TT I made a OO model of Garsdale (S&C) in my bedroom at my parents. I got fed up with the bad running triang locos, so converted the layout to American HO - "The Virginia Great Central Railroad". Never finished it, as I married & moved house and found American O gauge was cheap (£15 for a Atlas F9 back in the early 80's - from MG Sharp no less !!) OO & HO was packed away.

 

Anyway, a couple of shots of "Garsdale" - West Virginia !!

 

 

 

 

I still have the Rivarossi articulateds - now in a display cabinet in the dining room. They were (and still are) brilliant runners.

 

Brit15

[BlackRat]

Steve, love that neat wiring, I loom like that myself (military training!).

 

Brit, great pics, its really good seeing these pics from yesteryear!

 

Hope its bringing back memmmmmmories!

[bubbles2]

Here is a cutting taken from the Surrey Advertiser about 40 years ago, myself and my friend Warren both members of the Astolat Model Rly Club had just been won an awarded for exhibiting part of our Weymouth Quay Layout, our award was presented by that grand gentleman of model railways Bob Symes-schutzman who was president of the club, Thats me on the left.

Some things never change there's a Hymek in the picture I've just noticed B)

 

[BlackRat]

Geoff.....you aint changed a bit!................................ Honest!

 

Hymeks I mean! lol

[bubbles2]

Thanks for that Neil......... .

[graeme3300]

I just came across this topic. Wow! It brings back extreme nostalgia for me too.

 

What's strange is that I still have remnants of my first more permanent layout! The model railway bug bit deep when I was about 11 or 12 when my brothers and I got a Triang Transcontinental train set to share, with Series 3 track and the double-ended Bo-Bo diesel based very loosely on the VR 'B' class plus three streamlined carriages. This was set up on a wooden floor, played with, then had to be packed away again, so the bros. soon lost interest.

 

Within a year I had a 6 ft x 3 ft board set up in a shed, and laid down the Series 3. Starting to get 'Railway Modeller' each month from Feb 1962 opened my eyes to a great new model railway world. I learned a hell of a lot in a short time and soon got fed up with the limitations of Triang track and decided to try to make my own. I'd also managed to add an extra 3ft x 1ft piece to one end of the layout, plus a 6in x 7ft piece of hardwood timber along one side for extra strength, plus somewhere to fit the station platform and a lever frame to work all the points. The extra end board was made with a hole in it to create a valley and allow a short curved 5-span trestle bridge to be built and also let a narrow-gauge timber tramway pass below. You can still see a short bit of the NG track still in situ.

 

A set of curved points was drawn out full size on paper and traced, with heavy ballpoint centrelines clearly shown. The only track spikes I could get in those days were 'O' scale - 12mm long! So I made sub-bases for the track out of 1/8in balsa wood with extra laminated strips underneath like bridge girders to receive the dogspikes. The balsa was sealed with shellac and the tracings glued down. Sleepers were cut from thin wood about 1mm thick. In those days strawberry punnets were made from this stuff, so they were recycled as sleepers. I even used the same wood for the point throw-bars with two brass pins passed through from underneath and soldered to the point blades. One pair of points was made from NS rail approx Code 125, but by then I'd found that loose lengths of Peco Code 100 rail could be bought. Code 100 is so much easier to work with and the curved pointwork took a couple of weeks' work to make in spare time.

 

I was proud of the track I made way back when I was 14, and I'm still proud of it. A few years ago when I thought I would be able to rehabilitate the layout as a project with my son I put down a few modern wagons and every one of them rolled smoothly through the pointwork 40 years later. My lad is a keen musician and shows little current interest in model railways, but there's always hope!

 

The layout did get to the point where trains could operate, with bits of flex track between the scratchbuilt stuff, and the trestle bridge track made using the Jim Russell (Little Western) technique of small staples fixed through the sleepers and bent over underneath with the rails then soldered to them. Unfortunately the trestle bridge succumbed to something heavy falling on it some years later when the layout was stored. This layout really got me scratchbuilding, trying new techniques and giving things a go. It taught me about trying to make track to finer standards and tolerances and almost certainly was the trigger in hooking me for life to the amazingly diverse and enjoyable hobby that IS model railways.

 

I've said enough! This thread has been great to read and I hope many others take inspiration from it.

 

Regards,

Graeme

[BlackRat]

Graeme glad you are enjoying the thread, the track looks great and seems to have with stood the test of time!

[Pixie]

This is where it all began for me...

 

 

....which eventually grew into...

 

 

Y'know, I had more fun back then than any b*ggering around with P4 or 2mm ever has provided. I guess ignorance and innocence is bliss!

 

Pix

[BlackRat]

Pix, you STILL make me feel old!

 

Them were the days, what it was all about then was FUN ANS A SENSE OF IMAGINATION, something that many modellers loose or forget they possess!

 

To that there young man, I bet it was the bestest layout in the world and we all had one!

[travelintrev]

Not my first layout. (no photos of that yet, film was expensive in the 50's) But the first exhibition layout that I had a hand in. C,1964 at Brambleton (Harpenden) exhibiton.

The layout had hand built (12mm Gauge) Track. the stock was a mix of Gem 5.5mm Scale Festiniog kits[From memory these (as recommended were stuck together with Balsa Cement] and Scratch built stuff on Tri-ang TT chassis.

 

I'm the guy in the "Grease Top"................

[Pixie]

Pix, you STILL make me feel old!

 

Those photos make me feel old, I'm entirely sure where the time has gone since. Especially the last decade!

 

To that there young man, I bet it was the bestest layout in the world and we all had one!

 

It was... although a friend of mine at the time had the Lima HST with working tail lights and I was always jealous as my Hornby one didn't. I had the Hornby travelling post office though which was much more fun. I always thought it was a real rarity as it was the GWR one, not the lowly LMS one that was in the catalouges year after year.

 

The Woking show each year is my real return to childhood - it was almost straight after going back to school from the summer holidays and I'd be able to pick out my birthday present for the year. The experience of getting home with your new loco and dumping it on the track for a good thrashing was one of the most satisfying and exciting things to a knee-high nipper. I still takes me back when I visit this now!

 

Working on things with my dad has been a lasting memory - I was given a couple of ancient Hornby power cars by a school teacher which didn't work when they were put on the track. A bit narked I took them to him and he had soon whipped out a 'computer chip' (What I now know was a Zero1 decoder) and they were good to go. After that I thought he could defuse a nuclear bomb! I've still got an Airfix Prarie that we never managed to get going, maybe I should dig it out and give it a coat of looking at.

 

Pix

 

PS - Good luck in the marathon!

[BlackRat]

Pix, in its day the Airfix prarie was a revolution! Its still not a bad model now, though I dont know what the Hornby chassis is like but with Airfix it had a nice smooth 5 pole motor and ran pretty well for a rtr, in fact probably one of the best till Dapol brought out the Austerity (J94). it would also run on code 75, we used a couple in the Cardiff 4mm group on the Chepstow and Dowlais cae Harris layout.

 

Comet did (iirc) a replacement chassis, no probs for a man of your kaleyebur!

 

The J94 also caused a stir as it came complete with a spare set of wheels and axles for EM (I think).

 

My mate Pete Taylor always had the latest thing for his layout, including (drum rolllllllll dddrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr)

 

A Hornby Silver Seal Brush Type 4 with illuminated headcode (IVO3!).!!!!!!

 

Still I got all the totty so that made up for that!

 

A tenner for birthdays meant a trip to Bud Morgans in Castle Arcade, where you could buy things like a B12 with chuff chuff sounds for about £6 or £7 which meant you had some dosh left over for a couple of Grafar wagons, an Airfix kit, or if you looked old enough a Men Only from the news agents on the corner of the arcade!

 

Heady days!

 

Zero 1, used to flog them in Beatties, all good stuff for its day (along with the Commodore Vic 20......ask a history teacher!).

 

Run went ok, tho went off like a racin snake, forgetting the golden rule of sticking to your own pace. Managed 1;50.01 which is slower than last year (1;47.23) but I blame spending time here instead of training!

[Jason T]

My first layout consisted of a double track oval and various sidings pinned to an 8' x 4' board, Tri-ang track and rolling stock. My Dad (who had no interest in railways whatsoever) brought it home one day. No idea what happened to most of that but my second layout was on a 6' x 4' Sundela board with a corner removed (so it could go flush up against my bedroom wall) with initially a double track circuit and later on (bizarrely), single track. Yep, I seemed to downsize for some reason.

I'm sure that somewhere at my Mum's place, probably tucked away in a box up in the attic, there are photos of the layout I had when I was in my early teens; a fiddle yard to terminus affair that I was i was immensely proud of at the time. This was on fixed boards in the small wash-house at the back of our house and gave me a 'U' shaped layout measuring 8' x 6'. It was initially intended to allow for a full circuit to be possible by means of a removable section but the guy who Mum got in to do the baseboards, as nice as he was, didn't have a clue what he was doing and it would have taken the Dukes of Hazzard to be driving any trains to allow them to bridge the massive gaps.

 

It had a bridge across a river; the river had no 'water' in it because I never managed to seal the bed, so everything under the layout (lawnmower, etc) got a lovely coating of varnish. The bridge itself was basically across one of the lengths of 2x4's that supported the baseboards so to make it look more realistic, I managed to purchase two plaster strips that were embossed to look like stonework, and duly stuck them to the side of the 2X4, never giving a second thought to how the bridge would be supported in real life.

 

When I discovered girls, motorbikes, pubs, cars and mountain bikes, I sold most of the stock I had and dismantled the layout, keeping the track for future use (I somehow knew I would get back into it, even at 16, when trains were the last thing on my mind). 20 years later and I was battling the cobwebs in the attic to retrieve it all.

 

I will try and find those photos next time I am up North but for now, a couple of photos of the more meaningful items of stock I kept (nostalgic reasons):

 

The Princess Royal, 46200, with 2 Pullman carriages. My Grandad (who also had no interest in railways other than having worked on Morecambe station in his RAF role during the war and therefore knew a bit about railways - an encyclopedic amount to a 7 year old) used to tell me that the Princess Royal was a very special train and the Pullman coaches were for royalty and the like.

 

A Hornby Pannier and a few wagons. The Pannier was the first repaint I ever tried and I am sure that at some point, it had BR Lion and Wheel emblems on it. Behind it are two wagons, the first which I have tried to add a new livery to, and both of which have been subjected to my early attempts at weathering.

 

A Dapol Pug. I can remember going to the model shop in Lancaster (can't remember it's name but it's a pet shop now and has been for years) to buy this with saved up pocket money and birthday money, and being over the moon. It became the sole shunter and was used more than anything else I had. Eventually, for some mad reason, I decided that I would replace the wooden buffers with something more 'realistic' (yeah, I know) and in the process of doing so, I managed to render it a non-runner. It was only when I retrieved that box from the attic that I finally managed to get it running again, finished it off, weathered it and added a DCC chip to it. It occasionally gets used even now, albeit when messing around (and it actually runs ok, which is a miracle and testament to Dapol)

 

Sorry for rambling; it seems I got a bit carried away with this trip down memory lane.

[James]

I never got any photos of the 6x4 board with twin ovals of track on from when I was a child. Some years ago, I did build this before the cats (kittens at the time) meant it got taken down. Hmph. I should imagine it ticks all kinds of boxes as far as cliches go but we have to start somewhere I suppose.

 

That looks superb!

 

Do you still have the forty pictured?

[BlackRat]

Love the Pug!

 

One of my first 'proper' models was a pug, with a motorised wagon behind it!

 

The wagon had a motor glued in it, with a hole in the floor and an axle driven with a rubber band!

 

It worked ok(ish) and as a 14 year old, it pleased me no end!

 

The pug was weighted with lead strip from a detonator(!) donated by the signalman in Llandaff box, he made the kits on night shift to pass the time.

[James]

he made the kits on night shift to pass the time.

A number still do!

[Raffles]

That looks superb!

 

Do you still have the forty pictured?

 

Hello James,

 

I do still have the forty. It's one of the few models I am happy with. The Railmatch aerosols were having a good day that day...

 

Incidentally, my folks cleared out the loft recently for some insulation or something and I have been passed my first train set in a old cardboard box. It was given to my folks by a family friend and consists of a lot of Triang track (enough for two ovals) a load of buildings and a working mail coach. I couldn't resist the lure of nostalgia so the other night, I rubbed down the track with some 1200 grade wet'n'dry and made a circle on the floor. I then set a very old (metal motor bogie) 37 off round it.

 

Fantastic.

 

Gonna see how much I can fit on the dining room table next...