Older Inspirational Layouts

[Enterprisingwestern]

12 hours ago, Captain Slough said:

has anyone mentioned DMNS - Don's Miniature New Street?  Created by Don Jones, apparently it lasted until about 2007 at his home in Sutton Coldfield and he died around that time  

 

The ultimate layout built for effect, very impressive it was.

Weren't all the locos powered by bo-bo mechanisms?

 

Mike.

[drduncan]

On 26/02/2023 at 16:35, adrianmc said:

 

Yes - this is Butley Mills.

 

If things go to plan, the layout will be at Uckfield this year along with Cades Green, Trerice, Hepton Wharf and Longwood Edge.

 

Also hope to have some of Iain's North Cornwall stock on show from Tregarrick.

 

http://www.uckfieldmrc.co.uk/exhibition.html

What happened to the original part of the East Suffolk Light Railway - Orford Haven?

 

Duncan

[Clive martin]

On 01/04/2023 at 09:02, Enterprisingwestern said:

 

The ultimate layout built for effect, very impressive it was.

Weren't all the locos powered by bo-bo mechanisms?

 

Mike.

 

[Clive martin]

Their is a classic bit of footage of Dons minature new street on you tube ,just key in Birmingham New street !

[kevinlms]

13 hours ago, Clive martin said:

 

Don't know about all being Bo-Bo mechanisms, but all locos had 2 power bogies.

[Clive martin]

Hi Dons minature new Street was built in the heyday of the pancake motor bogie, so i guess he had to double motor his locos, i think Dons layout had some quite severe gradients !

[MarshLane]

On 15/09/2022 at 20:30, t-b-g said:

Thanks for the kind words and you have some lovely photos there Rich. It is always interesting when people point cameras at the layout and there still seem to be new angles and views to be had.

 

Tony Gee very kindly put up with my company for yet another evening tonight ... I have posted a little video of Grandborough Junction over on Tony Wright's thread if anyone wishes to take a look :)

 

 

[SD85]

I recently paid a visit to the Greenlane and Hillside Railway which is an extensive 0 gauge system with a focus on operation and timetables. It was the focus of a book that came out about 30 years ago called 'The Living Model Railway'.

 

The system is based in the attic and eaves of a large house. It runs on stud central contact via pick up skates with some centre rail used in the storage sidings. It also features interlocking of signals and points. The road has to be set and correctly signalled for the controller to work.

 

The whole set up is fascinating but sadly it is not currently wholly operational. The sections in the eaves require crawling on one's belly to reach them and I got the general impression that the owner of the railway and his operating team are all getting on in age and find access to those areas difficult. Running is therefore concentrated in the main room which consists of a large terminus station with through tracks to parcels and goods depots, carriage sidings and another station at one end. In the other direction the tracks go into a tight spiral which serves several stations and then diverges into the sections in the eaves. A branch line is also situated on this section above the main lines.

 

There was also a narrow gauge system running alongside the main line set up but this was never used fully on a regular basis according to the owner as the main line required too much attention to operate. The tracks are still there however.

 

I had hoped to attend an operating session but it was just myself and the owner there. At its height the system required 14 operators to run but I think the number has dwindled somewhat over the years and as a result operating sessions are not always as regular as they could be. I moved a few locos around the yard and spent most of the day taking photos of the system because apart from the aforementioned book and some older articles in magazines there is not a lot of information or pictures out there documenting the railway.

 

It is an enormously impressive set up and at its full operating capacity must be quite something to witness. The owner's father established the railway in 1921 and it has been in its present location since 1945. Some of the trackwork dates from the 1930s. This is a railway that is old school to the nines - bomber panel toggle switches, mechanical signalling in areas, and I think some of the block instruments are actual full size ones. It isn't finescale but it gets the character of the real thing and replicates the complexity of operating it. Very reminiscent of the famous Sherwood Section in places (indeed there is an LMS BG on there which originally came from Sherwood). 

 

It is a real labour of love and the owner has ideas about getting the local council to preserve it as a museum piece in the future but quite how they would get it out of its current location is a puzzle.

 

The owner is a friendly guy with some interesting stories relating to the local area and the railway. His father knew people high up in the local railway operations division and several quite prestigious people visited the layout in the past including Robert Riddles whom the owner met when a youngster. Many of the regular operators of the system down the years had interesting backgrounds and connections to railway history as well.

 

Overall a very enjoyable and fascinating visit. I took a lot of photographs and if I get the owner's permission I may post some here eventually.

Edited September 15, 2023 by SD85

[St Enodoc]

2 hours ago, SD85 said:

I recently paid a visit to the Greenlane and Hillside Railway which is an extensive 0 gauge system with a focus on operation and timetables. It was the focus of a book that came out about 30 years ago called 'The Living Model Railway'.

 

The system is based in the attic and eaves of a large house. It runs on stud central contact via pick up skates with some centre rail used in the storage sidings. It also features interlocking of signals and points. The road has to be set and correctly signalled for the controller to work.

 

The whole set up is fascinating but sadly it is not currently wholly operational. The sections in the eaves require crawling on one's belly to reach them and I got the general impression that the owner of the railway and his operating team are all getting on in age and find access to those areas difficult. Running is therefore concentrated in the main room which consists of a large terminus station with through tracks to parcels and goods depots, carriage sidings and another station at one end. In the other direction the tracks go into a tight spiral which serves several stations and then diverges into the sections in the eaves. A branch line is also situated on this section above the main lines.

 

There was also a narrow gauge system running alongside the main line set up but this was never used fully on a regular basis according to the owner as the main line required too much attention to operate. The tracks are still there however.

 

I had hoped to attend an operating session but it was just myself and the owner there. At its height the system required 14 operators to run but I think the number has dwindled somewhat over the years and as a result operating sessions are not always as regular as they could be. I moved a few locos around the yard and spent most of the day taking photos of the system because apart from the aforementioned book and some older articles in magazines there is not a lot of information or pictures out there documenting the railway.

 

It is an enormously impressive set up and at its full operating capacity must be quite something to witness. The owner's father established the railway in 1921 and it has been in its present location since 1945. Some of the trackwork dates from the 1930s. This is a railway that is old school to the nines - bomber panel toggle switches, mechanical signalling in areas, and I think some of the block instruments are actual full size ones. It isn't finescale but it gets the character of the real thing and replicates the complexity of operating it. Very reminiscent of the famous Sherwood Section in places (indeed there is an LMS BG on there which originally came from Sherwood). 

 

It is a real labour of love and the owner has ideas about getting the local council to preserve it as a museum piece in the future but quite how they would get it out of its current location is a puzzle.

 

The owner is a friendly guy with some interesting stories relating to the local area and the railway. His father knew people high up in the local railway operations division and several quite prestigious people visited the layout in the past including Robert Riddles whom the owner met when a youngster. Many of the regular operators of the system down the years had interesting backgrounds and connections to railway history as well.

 

Overall a very enjoyable and fascinating visit. I took a lot of photographs and if I get the owner's permission I may post some here eventually.

That's a great update! Although I lived within about 30 miles of the railway at one time I never had the chance to visit and I had imagined that in the intervening years it had closed and been dismantled. So good to hear that it is still there.

 

Thanks.

[Nearholmer]

Fascinating stuff.

 

I know of one fully old school layout of this kind outdoors, but had no idea that any indoor ones still existed.

[CKPR]

I always wonder what happened to Bill Tate's 'Millport & Selfield' railway in Manchester that also used pre-war LMC O gauge standards and ran using outside third rail pickup.

[Invicta Informant]

On 23/07/2022 at 13:55, Invicta Informant said:

To me, 'Older Inspirational Layouts' that come to mind are the ones that featured in the programmes A Lineside Look At Model Railways and Another Lineside Look At Model Railways both presented and narrated by Bob Symes. Bearing in mind the layouts featured were filmed in the 1980s, I am still impressed at what was achieved considering the modelling resources that were available back then. Often than not, they had to try and make something out of nothing and from materials outside the modelling genre.

 

The layouts featured in the two programmes were Bigston, the Daventry Garden Railway, Chiltern Green, Chesil Bay, Wyndlesham Cove, Axford, Rye Harbour, Borchester Market, Bevleys, Bromford & High Peak, Petherick, Ashdon & Midport, Combe Mellin, Wheal Louise, Filisur, and Port Sandford Harbour, with the credits mentioning the modellers Geoff Bigmore, Bryan Burchell, Tim Watson, Mike Hayward, Barry Norman, Dave & Shirley Rowe, Martin Brent, Frank Dyer, Dave Lowery, Ken Ashberry, David Simmonite, Robert Tivendale, Barry Kelsall, Colin Monk and Geoff Drew.

This recently cropped up in my YouTube 'Recommended'. The original Lineside Look At Model Railways has been up on YouTube from some years now (though split in three parts), but not the sequel.

 

[Lacathedrale]

i also had this come up on my recommendations, the combined first part is now uploaded also:

 

 

 

I bought myself a Railway Modeller subscription on their app to get access to all the backissues that they provide and scoured through the years for all the wonderful layouts that have been mentioned here - it was a worthwhile task and in some cases I exported the pages out for future reference. I do worry a little about the transitory nature of online and digital content - The Great RMweb Blackout of 2022 is one obvious example of how content can be either lost or made useless over time - not to mention the failure and closure of ImageShack, Photobucket, etc. - it really is a case of 'when' rather than 'if'.

 

As a result, I'm wondering what the best way to preserve this all is - do we archive digital material and transfer it to physical media (either paper or some kind of video format) ? This is a modern problem, because before the only medium we had was the printed word and image and that has been proven to last enough.

[Michael Hodgson]

On 15/09/2023 at 01:58, SD85 said:

I recently paid a visit to the Greenlane and Hillside Railway which is an extensive 0 gauge system with a focus on operation and timetables. It was the focus of a book that came out about 30 years ago called 'The Living Model Railway'.

 

The system is based in the attic and eaves of a large house. It runs on stud central contact via pick up skates with some centre rail used in the storage sidings. It also features interlocking of signals and points. The road has to be set and correctly signalled for the controller to work.

 

The whole set up is fascinating but sadly it is not currently wholly operational. The sections in the eaves require crawling on one's belly to reach them and I got the general impression that the owner of the railway and his operating team are all getting on in age and find access to those areas difficult. Running is therefore concentrated in the main room which consists of a large terminus station with through tracks to parcels and goods depots, carriage sidings and another station at one end. In the other direction the tracks go into a tight spiral which serves several stations and then diverges into the sections in the eaves. A branch line is also situated on this section above the main lines.

 

There was also a narrow gauge system running alongside the main line set up but this was never used fully on a regular basis according to the owner as the main line required too much attention to operate. The tracks are still there however.

 

I had hoped to attend an operating session but it was just myself and the owner there. At its height the system required 14 operators to run but I think the number has dwindled somewhat over the years and as a result operating sessions are not always as regular as they could be. I moved a few locos around the yard and spent most of the day taking photos of the system because apart from the aforementioned book and some older articles in magazines there is not a lot of information or pictures out there documenting the railway.

 

It is an enormously impressive set up and at its full operating capacity must be quite something to witness. The owner's father established the railway in 1921 and it has been in its present location since 1945. Some of the trackwork dates from the 1930s. This is a railway that is old school to the nines - bomber panel toggle switches, mechanical signalling in areas, and I think some of the block instruments are actual full size ones. It isn't finescale but it gets the character of the real thing and replicates the complexity of operating it. Very reminiscent of the famous Sherwood Section in places (indeed there is an LMS BG on there which originally came from Sherwood). 

 

It is a real labour of love and the owner has ideas about getting the local council to preserve it as a museum piece in the future but quite how they would get it out of its current location is a puzzle.

 

The owner is a friendly guy with some interesting stories relating to the local area and the railway. His father knew people high up in the local railway operations division and several quite prestigious people visited the layout in the past including Robert Riddles whom the owner met when a youngster. Many of the regular operators of the system down the years had interesting backgrounds and connections to railway history as well.

 

Overall a very enjoyable and fascinating visit. I took a lot of photographs and if I get the owner's permission I may post some here eventually.

 

I have only just seen this post.  For over half a century I have been a frequent visitor to and operator of this layout since I met the owner at University.  The owner's father was a GP and the layout was exhibited at the Doctors' Hobbies Exhibition and written up across 3 consecutive issues of the Model Railway Constructor in the late 1950s or early 1960s. 

 

Emphasis has always been on operation, with scenics perhaps of secondary importance.  However scenic work has received a lot more attention in recent years, and quite a lot of improvements have been made and are continuing.  The layout used to be run weekly (to a timetable using a speeded up clock, but it cannot be run from one central location.  It requires a reasonable number of operators to man the signalboxes, who need a working knowledge of Absolute Block signalling and who also have to become familiar with the hand-built controllers and the way they connect via the signalling, and there have not been enough such people locally in recent years.  The owner does have some health problems and layout maintenance is difficult, but there is still limited operation, albeit infrequently.

 

The owner has been trying for several years to secure a future for the layout when he is no longer around.  There were extensive discussions with AIMREC who had agreed to take on the layout, and a start was even made on preparation for this, but because AIMREC were unable to get the extensive premises originally envisaged, unfortunately that plan has now fallen through.

 

The layout was originally based on a hypothetical route from the mythical town of Hillside in the West Riding via the Bowland Forest to the hypothetical port of Greenlane in Lancashire, but which escaped Grouping and remained independent for unexplaimed reasons, maintaining through services to the LMS, and LNER using mostly locos from those companies and their constituents.  In more recent years, the owner has acquired or built a number of GWR and SR locos, and the layout is now deemed to be based on a hypothetical GWR route to a location in the Midlands.

[AndyB]

1975. The National Railway Exhibition organised by the MRC found me enthralled by The Newton Tracey Branch constructed by Keith Ames.

A beautiful N gauge GWR BLT.

 

©MRC

 

I've no idea how long I stood by the halt hoping one of the trains might stop; they never seemed to. 

 

But there was definitely something about the bucolic scene with a pannier tank trundling through it that caught my imagination.

 

I'd like to think that it partly inspired my Nantford Spinney layout many decades later.

 

©MRC

[DLT]

Yes, I remember admiring the Newton Tracey branch, and the magnificent Chipping Norton in 2mm finescale that followed.  Featured in MRJ No.20

[Barry O]

3 hours ago, DLT said:

Yes, I remember admiring the Newton Tracey branch, and the magnificent Chipping Norton in 2mm finescale that followed.  Featured in MRJ No.20

Chipping Norton is now being cared for by the Leeds MRS. It needs some wiring repairs and a bit of scenery cleaning but we hope to exhibit it in the future as a way of showing the quality of Keith Ames work.

 

Baz

Edited December 10, 2023 by Barry O

[JohnR]

15 hours ago, AndyB said:

1975. The National Railway Exhibition organised by the MRC found me enthralled by The Newton Tracey Branch constructed by Keith Ames.

A beautiful N gauge GWR BLT.

 

©MRC

 

I've no idea how long I stood by the halt hoping one of the trains might stop; they never seemed to. 

 

But there was definitely something about the bucolic scene with a pannier tank trundling through it that caught my imagination.

 

I'd like to think that it partly inspired my Nantford Spinney layout many decades later.

 

©MRC

 

Did this ever appear in the modelling press? I'm sure I recall reading about it (or something similar), but cant find it in the RM archive.

[Peter Kazmierczak]

I assume the layout plan of Newton Tracey in the show guide is incorrect in not showing any form of run-round loop.

[kevinlms]

17 hours ago, Peter Kazmierczak said:

I assume the layout plan of Newton Tracey in the show guide is incorrect in not showing any form of run-round loop.

Often track plans are drawn incorrectly. Sometimes photos accompanying the article reveal the truth!

[DLT]

20 hours ago, JohnR said:

 

Did this ever appear in the modelling press? I'm sure I recall reading about it (or something similar), but cant find it in the RM archive.

Newton Tracey definitely appeared in the press, but I can't remember which magazine.  It may have been one of the several mags that came and went in a short time.

[PaulRhB]

39 minutes ago, DLT said:

Newton Tracey definitely appeared in the press, but I can't remember which magazine.  It may have been one of the several mags that came and went in a short time.

Railway Modeller September 1980, railway of the month. 

He also says in the article it was in MRC in April 1976.

Edited December 12, 2023 by PaulRhB

[PaulRhB]

21 hours ago, Peter Kazmierczak said:

I assume the layout plan of Newton Tracey in the show guide is incorrect in not showing any form of run-round loop.

Yes it’s missing a crossover in the platform according to the RM plan. 

[NHY 581]

1 minute ago, PaulRhB said:

Railway Modeller September 1980, railway of the month. 

 

Also featured in that issue was part two of Lochside by Ian Futers. 

 

Rob

[New Haven Neil]

1 hour ago, NHY 581 said:

 

Also featured in that issue was part two of Lochside by Ian Futers. 

 

Rob

 

I preferred Ian's layouts when he was in his circular phase, the Border Counties models. #feeling old#