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As you rightly say, the very best of both worlds. there is something quite nice about setting something going, even better two trains in opposite directions on a double track and just let them trundle round, crossing in different places. The layout I mentioned with 5 stations has an optional continuous run with some hidden loops. rather like David Jenkinson with his "funny" trains, the plan is to have a number of trains there that are not in the main operating sequence, or are out of period or too long for the stations to handle. they can be run when we are doing some scenic work on the layout itself or when visitors come. I think the point I was trying to make is not so much that one or the other approach is the right one, making others wrong. It is more that whatever we approach, it involves some compromise and it is up to the individual to decide what compromises they are willing to accept.

There is a big difference to me between a home based layout and an exhibition one. Very few people will watch a layout at a show for 6 hours solid. Yet when a visitor comes to see some home layouts, running sessions there can consist of that much running in a day. The other thing is that I wonder how many of the big home based "roundy roundy" layouts ever get run when there are no visitors. The ones I know simply stand idle for weeks or months on end as the people behind them have little interest in operation themselves. Which is fine but I can't help but feel that they miss out on a big chunk of the pleasure the hobby can bring. I spend two evenings a week operating one layout and some part of a day once a week operating another. Both layouts are intricate, challenging and interesting to operate and I and the other operators never get bored. As an example of the difference between playing trains and operating, I will quote the coal train that we run on Buckingham. At the start of the timetable, there are empty coal wagons all over the layout. There are 6 at Buckingham, 3 in the coal depot, two in the gasworks and one at the loco shed. At the alloted time, the pilot collects a brake van, assembles the wagons and puts them in a suitable siding to allow a train loco to come off shed and back on. Once this has happened, after a short while the train departs to Grandborough Junction. There it picks up an empty loco coal wagon from the shed there, two empties from the goods yard and three more that came down from Leighton Buzzard (or they will when we get that attached!). A while later, the train departs for "The midlands" ie the fiddle yard, where the wagon bodies are replaced and the train is now a rake of full wagons. later in the day, the train returns and carries out the reverse operations, dropping wagons at Grandborogh before going on to Buckingham. At the end of the sequence, the bodies are once again swapped for empties for the next run through the sequence. Now this train only has 12 wagons, which won't suit those who think that only a 50 wagon train is worth bothering with. Yet I and my operators do so much more with our 12 than any roundy roundy that just sends 'em round. We are more railway like in that each coal train is marshalled slightly differently and we may have any one of several locos on it and any one of several brake vans, so it is not quite the same each run, whereas those on a roundy roundy invariably have an identical appearance each time they run. As I say, it is up to each individual to decide which they prefer and which is more of a compromise. Is a long train going in a circle any more or less of a compromise than a shorter train working a line like a real one? You decide? As a final thought, how many of us actually stood by the lineside watching trains go by? Unless it happened that we lived near an open stretch of line and nowhere near a big station. I live right next to the ECML but when I watched real trains I went to Doncaster or York where interesting operation went on. Standing by a main line watching trains go by bored me very quickly on the real thing too.

Hello Andy, You are most welcome any time you can get here. Although the other Tony is moving away soon, I have a couple of other regulars on a Tuesday and a Friday, so our regular running sessions should be OK. If we can make time, we should see if we can arrange for you to see the layout I mention above, with the 5 stations. It is like Buckingham with an extra through station after Grandborough and the fiddle yard modelled as another terminus. Tony

My turn to stir the pot! Most roundy roundy layouts, even some well known examples of real locations, are, operationally, no further forward than the basic Christmas present boxed train set. The trains go round in a circle. It is a very much embellished compared with the boxed set but is just as operationally toy like. The same train goes, for example, North each time it runs but never goes South again. So exactly how many "Talismans" are we supposed to believe are actually at Kings Cross? Or do you build two sets and have one going each way? Unless you have a linear layout, with either a terminus to fiddle yard or a through station with a fiddle yard at each end, where trains are reversed and sent back (or even better, other stations), you are just playing trains, rather than operating a small railway. It is possible to have a fiddle yard where trains can be reversed but then you end up with 90% of the "operation" being in the "doesn't really exist" fiddle yard. Again, not realistic. Having had layouts in many different formats, I find the "roundy roundy" the least satisfying to operate as it is by far the most unrealistic. All modelling involves compromise. Some compromise lengths of stations and trains, some compromise operating practice, some compromise both. Isn't it the case that each and every modeller should be allowed to decide exactly which compromises they are willing to accept to be able to build the layout they want? A project I am involved with currently has 5 stations. Two are main line terminus stations, there are two through stations, one of which is a junction to a branch terminus. There are 3 loco sheds, carriage sidings, goods yards, express and suburban trains plus branch services and we are presently developing an operating sequence. It is fictitious and trains are limited to "only" 8 bogie carriages so some folk would find it completely lacking in appeal but it is great fun to operate. Complex, challenging and highly satisfying. Each to their own!

As nobody else has done it, I will mention that the thread has got to 500 pages and never a dull moment or any sign of it flagging. Great stuff and although Tony W will probably say that it is down to the contributions made by others, I reckon that he deserves a great deal of credit for taking the plunge and setting it all going and for continuing to show us the lovely model making that he and the other contributors to Little Bytham have done. Here's to the next 500! Tony Gee

Many thanks for the kind words! In theory, it would be possible for me to borrow the original Tickhill & Wadworth stock from Malcolm Crawley's family and put the layout out again. About 40% of it was mine anyway and as some of the locos have passed to me now, we could probably manage with what we have. But it is most unlikely to happen, at least while I have the layout. The main factor is that out of the group of people who took the layout out with me, several are no longer with us and those that are have lost their enthusiasm for the work involved in preparing, transporting and exhibiting such a layout. That includes me to some extent. I have just spent the whole day trying to find all the bits that we need to take "Church Warsop" out this weekend. So many bits get used on other layouts that they get spread all over the place and it has been an all day job and I still need to find some more bits, set it up, clean and test it, service the stock and locos and pack it up. It is much more fun to walk down to the shed, open the door, flick a switch on and play trains! Tickhill & Wadworth still exists, stored in my garage, which won't be doing it a lot of good. Negotiations are in hand for it to go to a new home, where it will have a new lease of life. In truth, it was an enjoyable project but although it was possible to operate it just like the real place, it was the sort of place where not too much happened. I always found that a weekend operating it a couple of times a year was enough and even when I cleared the garage to get it set up, I never bothered as it would never sustain operational interest for me as a home layout. I guess that I am spoiled now. I have what is possibly the best layout that I have ever operated at my place, along with friends who come around twice a week to drink tea, talk trains and operate. It has certainly changed my hobby completely and my exhibition involvement, while I would never want it to stop completely, will be very much reduced from now on. I had pretty much decided that I wouldn't build any new layouts as I have plenty to keep me busy but I couldn't resist just one more, which is ready for work to start any time now.

Bit too cryptic for me! No dogs at Thorne that I can see. Just the usual fish, newts and frogs! And the Mrs has never bitten me yet!

Gamston Bank was indeed a good exhibition layout but I doubt that it would hold much interest operationally in a home situation. It was a place where my Dad used to take me trainspotting in the mid 70s, so it was a scene that I knew, although not when Gresley, Peppercorn and Thompson designs were around. It is not really my place to announce details of a new project by another modeller but I will say that John's next project is also to be a model of a real place and there will be little RTR on it, so it ticks all the right boxes with me!

Gamston Bank was purely an exhibition layout and was stored in a trailer between shows. Its last outing was at Hull this time last year (a little plug for this year - next weekend!) and it had deteriorated quite badly in the rather cold and damp storage facilities. John got very disheartened by the amount of work it would need to sort it out, especially for a layout that only came out from time to time and decided it was time for it to go to make way for another layout that could live in much better conditions, set up at home. Anybody taking it on would have had a nightmare and might have been better starting from new. Having exhibited layouts for 35 years and now having a rather special one set up and available for playing trains any time, I am with him 100%. Edited for spelling.

A bit extreme but that is how we deal with such things.

A layout that has had a mention or two on this thread has been Gamston Bank. Last night, the layout made one final public appearance. Here are a couple of snaps to illustrate the "viking funeral" that sent it on its way.

Quite right. Some folk will go to great lengths to model a loco, carriage or wagon accurately and then put them in highly unlikely formations. It is something that I always look out for at shows and it is one of the things that lifts a good model railway to the next level if it is done properly. Tony

If you look again, you will see an unfitted brake van part way along. It is two trains coupled together. The leading freight has a fitted head and the rear one is fully fitted. I am sure that they were coupled together purely for testing the haulage capacity of the loco and I can confirm that rake of wagons is not run as a prototypical train on the layout normally.

The thing with outside valve gear on the vast majority of locos that have it is that whatever position you model it in, it doesn't match what the loco is doing for much of the time. So there is no way that anybody can say that a model is really wrong as long as all the bits are the right shape and size. That is, unless you are one of those really clever people who make it work properly on a model. I know it has been done. I tend to subscribe to the view that the time when anybody is going to closely examine valve gear is when a loco is standing still, so Another good reason for modelling the GCR. Fewer locos with outside valve gear gear on it than even the "outside gear phobic" GWR!

When I exhibited Tickhill & Wadworth I relied very heavily on the excellent Bachmann "Blue Riband" private owner wagons until my good friend John Quick mentioned that the size of the wagons was wrong for the pre WW1 date, as they were based on the 1923 RCH design. This had never occurred to me previously but I looked at the relative sizes of the 1923 and the previous designs and it was like running HO wagons and OO wagons together. Now these things matter to some people more than others but I set to work replacing the RTR wagons with kits from Slaters and Cambrian of the earlier types and once I knew that the difference was there, I felt it was worth the extra effort. In the photo above, the Sherwood wagon is the older design (probably from a pre-printed Mike's Models kit - mine was!) and the Co-op one next door is the 1923 version, which demonstrates the difference quite well. I would never dream of telling anybody what they should or shouldn't run on their layout but if I had collected that bunch of wagons, I may be tempted to either weed the larger ones out or at least not run the big and small ones in the same train together.

The problem with these sorts of projects is that they are put in the hands of people who want to make a bit of a name for themselves as designers. Copying an old design carries very little kudos, so such people are far more interested in created something that hasn't been seen before, rather than something that is a copy of something from the period. So once you start asking architects to submit designs, rather than railway enthusiasts or professionals, this is what you get. There have been several buildings built new for preserved railways that are sympathetic and in keeping with the idea of heritage and recreating the past (which is supposed to be what preserved railways are about). This will not be one of them. As I said, I don't have a problem with modern architecture. I think the way that the old sheds at Lincoln have been brought into modern use with sympathetic alterations is superb and there are some modern structures that I really admire and enjoy. But in that situation, putting a modern design of building right next door to a station built to recreate the "old days" is just a horrible clash.

I hope that the modern design of building is much cheaper and quicker to build than a more traditional building because other than those reasons, I can think of nothing very much that it has in its favour. Perhaps they should demolish Loughborough station and replace it with a bus shelter if we want to go for a preserved railway in a modern style. After going to all the trouble of trying to recreate a "period" station at the Leicester it is now going to have a big curvy block of concrete next to it. The museum would have been an ideal opportunity to recreate a GCR loco shed, or a goods warehouse of the type that features on the lovely model of Leicester South. Such a design would sit very nicely with the present station and add to the period railway atmosphere. I don't have a problem with modern architecture in the right sort of setting. If it had been a gallery of modern sculpture and art, I would be applauding the design. Or if it was a "stand alone" railway museum building, not on a preserved railway site, I wouldn't have a problem with it. But it isn't. It is a design that goes against all that a preserved railway environment should be. Of course that is just my personal opinion. Others may think that it is a great design and fits in with the theme of the preserved GCR well. I just don't see it!

That is a useful technique for many a kit but this particular one has a half etched groove for you to solder the boiler band strip into. I built one years ago and hated it as the strips supplied were narrower than the groove, leaving gaps to fill just like the photos! I think that I just flooded mine with solder and spent ages cleaning it up afterwards. Nowadays, if faced with that sort of task, I would chuck the etched boiler away and get some brass tube and then do the boiler bands as you have suggested.

We worked our fiddle yard (a fan of sidings) by having two locos for each train. There are no turning facilities on Mansfield so when an express leaves, the tender loco ends up chimney first at the far end on the fiddle yard. Another express, which has left the fiddle yard, has the stock shunted to another platform or the centre road or goes back to the fiddle yard "carriage sidings" and the loco that brought that train in departs light engine to go "on shed". In reality, it backs onto the stock in the fiddle yard and forms a future arrival. When that train eventually goes back into the station, it releases the loco trapped at the fiddle yard end, which can then back down into the station coming "off shed" to work another train out. So two locos, one pointing each way (or a good selection of tank locos for a more suburban type operation) works without too much needing to be done in the fiddle yard. If you have a brake van at each end of a freight, the system works for them too but we stuck to swapping the brake van to the other end manually.

No such real place. The inspiration for the centre road arrangement, the as yet unfinished buildings and also the unusual platform numbering came from the LD&ECR terminus at Chesterfield Market Place. That had 4 platforms numbered 1,2,4 and 5. Road 3 in that case was the centre road, as is road 2 on my layout. That company did think about a line to Mansfield and as there was already a Mansfield Midland and a Mansfield Central in real life, it seemed a good name to use. You are quite right, Minories was a superb bit of layout design. Adaptable to many circumstances and able to take the odd tweak without spoiling the concept too much.

It was a deliberate departure from the CJF plan. You can't say that the crossover is wrong. Just different! My idea was to go back to the days when some stations had an arrival and a departure "side". All arrivals (apart from on the centre road) had to go into Platform 1. there were 4 different ways of dealing with any arrival. You could just put another train loco on the back and depart it, you could shunt it to the centre road or to Platform 3 to clear Platform 1 for another arrival, you could pull the stock out with the pilot to release the trapped loco and then put the stock back into platform one or you could take it to the "offstage" carriage sidings with the pilot. As Platform 3 was the "departure" side most of the moves involved shunting the stock there although in the "rush hour" some local services just got another loco on the back and went out as Platform 3 was occupied. It made for interesting operation, although the 7mm version is as you have said, with scope to arrive or depart from any of the three roads. It will make for a good comparison as to which works better. I always find that you can draw layouts until you run out of paper but until you build it and try moves out for real, you can never tell how satisfying it is going to be to operate.

John Quick has been gathering information on GCR carriages for many years and a book is in the pipeline but he is not the sort of person that can be rushed. Initially he was going to cover GCR period carriages but I spoke to him a while ago and he was trying to find information on earlier vehicles, going way, way back. His book on Robinson GCR liveries is superb but it took him a long time and a lot of work until he had all the information he needed to go ahead and publish. Brackley is looking very nice, It is already a superb layout. Knowing John, I think he would probably want to have it looking more "finished" before it is seen widely. At the moment, there is still much to be done. Tony Gee

Malcolm did indeed express a wish that the publication went ahead without photos. The reason being that there were various tender types that he hadn't found photos of and there were also some photos where it was difficult to pin down exactly what the tender type was. As you say new information (and details of previously unknown variations) are still being found. He realised that he didn't have time to do all the research he wanted to do and that he would rather have the publication issued without photos at all, rather than have an incomplete set of photos that hadn't been properly researched by him and may possibly have errors in the captions. He knew how long he had taken to get to where he had and also how much longer it would take to sort the photos out and he knew he didn't have that time left. So he decided against including photos, although he did tell me that he hoped that somebody else may do a full photographic survey later. I spent two evenings a week with him and saw the gradual progress he was making over the years, hunting down GA drawings and photos. He even spent time researching foundry techniques of the 1850s to see how the size of plate material changed over the years. It was great fun poring over old GA drawings, checking them against what Paul Craig had drawn and sometimes spotting the odd feature that was new to us both in a photo or a GA.

I would just add that after looking back over the thread, there was a mention by me of some O gauge urges. Well, it is happening. Two GCR locos started and plans being drawn up for a 7mm scale GCR period, based on (you've guessed it), Minories! It will be almost a 7mm version of the "Mansfield Market Place, with the centre road and two platforms, although the pointwork will be altered to allow arrivals and departures from both platforms. The use of 3 link couplings will mean that the dock will be moved to the other side and may well become a 2 road goods yard rather than a dedicated fish/parcels dock. I want to try something different and to see if an O gauge double track terminus, with 4-6-0 locos and 5 bogie carriages, can be built in 16' x 2'6". So far, the plans suggest that it can. The basic plan is to have an O gauge mini "Buckingham", with some of the EM locos and trains re-created in 7mm scale.

This is a diagram of the adapted track layout to include a centre "holding" road which is used for the arrival/departure of fish/parcels trains and a loading dock, as used on my Mansfield Market Place project.