Chris M

The Moretonhampstead branch closed to passengers in 1959 but remained open for freight until 1964 so I guess that’s where the brake van railtour is headed. By 1963 Newton Abbot had only one steam loco but the Exeter shads had a few more including a few ex GWR small locos. So that explains why the tour started at Exeter and ran along the sea wall. I would love to ride along the sea wall in a brake van! I’ve also found that there was at least one special along the Moretonhampstead branch but that used coaches rather than brake vans. While a brake van special along the sea wall is taking a bit of a liberty with faithful modelling it certainly would have been possible. And of course it adds a bit of interest at an exhibition. If anyone should question it I can quote the above.

Looks like I will be running my 1963 stock at the Swindon Steam Museum show next month. That will mean Westerns in maroon, desert sand and golden ochre. it also gives me a chance to run my brake van railtour train. The brake van railtour was a thing back in the 60s but it was to visit freight only lines. I guess this one could be travelling from what was by then the freight only branch from Exeter to the by then freight only branch from Newton Abbot.

Coming along nicely. I always find models of real locations far more interesting than fictitious ones. Yes there is always compromise but so long as the model is close then that's great. Keep up the great work!

The question for me is who will the replacements be? They need to bring in someone who is good at marketing and also understands the model railway marketplace. There aren't many of them around. As has been shown in the past marketing experts who don't understand the world of model railways don't tend to do very well for themselves or the company that employs them.

The recently closed New Street station signal box is a fine example of the opposite to this thread. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Birmingham_New_Street_Signal_Box#/media/File%3ABrum_New_St_Signal_Box.jpg

Carlisle market https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carlisle_Market_Hall#/media/File:Victorian_covered_market,_Carlisle_-_geograph.org.uk_-_978507.jpg

Are you absolutely sure that isn't a model? Ok the lighting is good and the track is finescale but its all a bit twee.

That was one of the lines I was thinking of. There was no engine shed at Newquay in the later years but there were plenty of carriage sidings. I guess summer Saturdays may well have seen 4-6-0s on short branch trains to get them to Newquay ready for the holiday makers return trains. Kingswear was of course another famous place for express locos on a single track branch. Many other single track branches just used double headed tank locos to run the Saturday holiday maker trains with a big loco taking over at the main line junction.

I’m going to be tweaking at my next exhibition. I’ll be running a brake van special along the main line! Well they had to get to the branch lines didn’t they?

Large locos on a single track line happened in quite a few places. On layouts I’m not sure whether a single track branch that can take large locos is a cliche or a tweak. Some heritage lines can take heavier locos than they could in BR days. The SVR for instance strengthened all its bridges so it could safely take larger locos many years ago. That was when it had some cash.

That's a very nice little layout and its coming along well. It shows what can be done in N gauge in a reasonable space. I look forward to seeing it at an exhibition one day.. I went extreme minimalist with the lighting on my last lighting rig. I used an LED light strip attached to a pine moulding and made the nameboard with a left over bit of Hobby craft foam board. It works well, is very light, doesn't take up much room and is easy to carry. The trick with LED light strip is to not buy cheap stuff without any proper ratings - in my experience you need at least 800 lumens per metre. I have found that warm white (3000K - 3500K) gives the effect of a nice sunny day.

I try to avoid cliches. I wouldn’t have a bit of welding, a road accident etc etc. I did however have a button on the front of my last layout which said “do not press”. When pressed there was a flash of lightning and a thunderclap. I’m sure fellow exhibitors weren’t impressed but the best compliment I had from a steward was that my layout always had the most smiling faces around it. Being a serious 😉 modeller I don’t have anything like that on my current lauout.

Thanks for posting, I've got a bit of inspiration from this. When running my Devon based layout in late 1980s mode I run clayhoods east on the basis that they are being taken for scrap and almost pristine CDAs west on the grounds they are new wagons heading towards a lifetime in Cornwall. I often use William Cookworthy for these duties (yes in the Cornish livery which is not right for 1988). Maybe that should be an entry on the cliche thread. I also have the GBRf class 50 twins that I use when running my contemporary set of stock but I haven't got a suitable scrap items train for them yet. It has just occurred to me I could maybe use the 50s to haul an eastbound train of CDAs going for scrap. The only problem with this is that my CDAs are clean ECC livery so I would need another rake to make a reasonably believable train of CDAs going for scrap today. Its still a thought though.

I tend to run trains into my platform at a higher speed than I should at exhibitions which is a bit of a tweak. The speed limit in real life for the platform lines is 25mph. At home I love running trains through the points and all along the platform at this speed. At exhibitions I run them just a little faster as I think most visitors would get bored at the time it takes for a train to run the length of the platform. It is useful to check what scale speed you are running at. When I checked mine I found that I was generally running my freights a little too slow and my expresses a little too fast. I've been told parcels trains can get a bit of a rattle on. Apparently, back in the 1960s the parcels between Exeter and Newton Abbot was one of the fastest trains over that stretch of line, that may have been due to guy who usually drove it.

Agreed, but a depressing majority of exhibition layouts still look like track laid on a flat board with bits of scenery built up around the track when they shouldn't.

Thanks. Luckily for me it was my birthday last week so the cars were birthday presents from family.

Every layout builder/owner will have their own set of tweaks/rules. I actually have different rules, or tweaks to reality for different layouts. Its all about what the builder is trying to achieve. On my garden railway trains from different continents can sometimes be seen running at the same time; the important thing is that the sun is shining (anyone remember the sun shining). At the other extreme, on my Dawlish Warren layout I won't run anything that hasn't been through the real place, even when I am running things alone at home. I admit I have made other tweaks on Dawlish Warren, almost all are to make it fit the space I have. At exhibitions we just run a stream of trains, some stopping, some running through. As soon as one train gets into the storage sidings another is sent out. The real place is quite busy but nowhere near as busy as we make it so that's another major tweak. I like to run to a sequence at home as this creates a logical even flow of trains. We did try running to a sequence at an exhibition once but found that it required too much concentration when running for a whole day. I think running the way we do is both entertaining and still reasonably accurate. At exhibitions, operators sometimes bring in their own tweaks. I'm quite hard on these if I spot them. For instance when running 1968 stock I sort of upset a friend and helper because I did not want him running his DMU with speed whiskers with the 1968 stock. I would have allowed it if we were running 1963 stock (but only just). Maybe I am too fussy but the layout has to be correct to what I think it should be otherwise I don't enjoy exhibiting. At home I sometimes go a bit wild and run contemporary stock with the 1960s/1970s buildings and semaphores in place! I would consider it wrong to do this at an exhibition, unless it was requested by the exhibition manager. This could happen if a show was very short on contemporary layouts but I'm not sure how comfortable I would feel about it.

I have now populated the Motorail train with cars. This might sound simple but obtaining a good variety of 1960s cars in N gauge took a lot of searching. All being well they should be trundling round the layout at the Swindon Stem museum next month. While I'm on videos here is my tribute to hydraulics. It includes clips from Dawlish Warren and my previous layout.

I have been to Switzerland and Austria a number of times and they are amazingly clean (and pretty) countries. I can see why models tend to be the way they are. The real trains of Switzerland are kept quite clean but they still have road dirt around the underframes and less than sparkling roofs. I think is the case on all railways around the world. You can keep the sides (and even the ends) clean and shiny but the underframes and bogies will become less than clean within a couple of days of entering service. Likewise the roofs will slowly loose their shine over the first month or so of service. The time of year may well affect cleanliness. I’m sure locos get a lot dirtier a lot quicker during the damp winter months than they do during a (sometimes) dry period in the summer.

I’m pretty sure all layouts run a greater variety of stock than would ever have been seen in one day. It is reasonable to run locos that would have been seen during an era though not all on one day.

The biggest and to my mind most unsatisfactory "tweak" compared to reality is that so many layouts are so obviously track laid on a flat baseboard with scenery built around it. Sad to say a lot of exquisitely modelled finescale layouts suffer from this problem. Surely by now all layouts should be built using open baseboards with land levels being both above and below track height. Having said that I look forward to seeing Beijiao once again at the NEC in November. It is a well modelled, realistic layout with plenty of trains and entertainment. I have never been to China and your illuminated interiors are fine by me because I don't know any better. I do not like to see modern British trains with illuminated interiors. They look so wrong to me because, having seen loads of them on the big railway, I know you just can't see the interiors at all on modern trains during the daylight hours. Likewise diesel layouts based before the headlamp era - in reality you just didn't notice the rather dim marker lights during the hours of daylight. Yes the general public do like to see illuminated stock but I'm afraid I find it more train set than serious model railway and for me it is a tweak too far. One tweak from reality that is caused by layout builders taking no action is not weathering stock. Pristine stock straight out of the box just looks so "plastic" that it ruins any semblance of realism - one or two clean items might be ok but really most stock should be gently weathered. Layouts running a much higher frequency of trains than they should are a very important and good tweak. Likewise a little branch that uses more than one loco is quite a big tweak but nevertheless important for entertainment.

Work progresses on the NEC exhibition all through the year. The 2023 exhibition, which will be on the 25th & 26th November, is now pretty much tied down and ready to happen. No doubt there will be a few last minute layout changes as there always are. The trade exhibitor space is effectively full although it might be possible to fit one or two more stands in if any more requests are received.

The reverse used to happen last decade. On my commute to work I occasionally saw a tube train hauled by a couple of 20s (if I recall correctly) at Solihull station. Modelling that would be adding interest rather than adding a cliche.

Some photos taken last December I do have a soft spot for 158s and I have an N gauge model in this livery. The cafe/ signal box Stairs on down platform. Main station building on the down platform waiting room on the up platform

1980s would also work for me