Buckden station was a small station on the Kettering & Huntingdon branch line, originally built by the Midland Railway in 1866 (as Brampton) it transferred to the London, Midland and Scottish Railway upon grouping, and survived until 1959. It was a small station, with a single line serving the handsome station building, small Midland style signal box, weighing machine, cattle dock and between the goods loop and single long curving siding stood an odd shaped goods shed with a small platform of its own.

All this sets the station apart from many others not a jot, apart from it's seeming simplicity and quaintness. However I grew up in Buckden and (as I was born in 1983) was driven down the former trackbed most days from the age of 13 onwards on the way to school, and plenty of times prior to that one the way into Huntingdon on what is now Buckden road - looping round and under the A1 beneath the bridge which on many previous days would have seen an Ivatt 2MT amongst the traction steaming towards Grafham and beyond.

Buckden station was therefore long part of the scenery. Although, strangely given me and my friends tendency to roam on our bikes places we weren't supposed to be, we never visited the slowly decaying station building as it sat as part of a skip hire premises. Rotting until it and all remnance of the small station complex was demolished to form part of the expansion of recycling facilities at the adjoining Brampton landfill.

The line itself was also somewhat in my blood, my mother growing up in Cranford further up the branch towards Kettering meant visits to my Nan and Grandad's bungalow led us passed the lovely viaduct spanning the Nene and the obviously railway derived buildings at what was Isliip furnaces. I can remember many Saturdays waiting until I was allowed to cross the fence in Nan and Grandad's back garden to scale the embankment and run along the trackbed pretending to be a steam train.

So when a combination of my Mum's copy of Middleton Press' "Branch Lines around Huntingdon" with it's evocative image of an Ivatt Mogul on the Buckden Road trackbed I knew so well, an out-of the blue visit to a model railway show somewhere in the New Forest whilst my girlfriend was at a craft fayre, and same girlfriends surprising tolerance of a railway modelling habbit occured the spark of railway modelling I had left behind in my teens was re-enlightened.

This blog will chart my attempts to create a fairly-close-to-truth model of Buckden in OO in the spare ("train") room of our house in my spare time.

Please be gentle.