t-b-g

We all have our areas of interest. Mine is the British pregrouping scene. I also like to see things that people have made/altered/weathered/adapted or had some personal input into. Out of the box RTR doesn't inspire or interest me. If I only went to shows with a decent number of layouts that cater for my personal interests, I would never go to another show. Good modelling is good modelling. I do gave a slight problem with a lot of modelling of overseas railways in that many layouts do seem to be mainly RTR, often unweathered and straight out of the box. There are exceptions but seeing locos and stock that people have made is a rare thing. We also seem to get rather too many cliche ridden layouts, such as the USA logging layout with the trestle bridge, broken down timber workshop, the bear in the trees, canyons and a Shay trundling along with the clanging bell, or the Swiss layout along a mountainside with the curved viaduct and bottle brush trees. We get cliche UK layouts too. Yet give me a Pempoul and I can thoroughly enjoy a non UK layout. I enjoyed the Cuban layout too, as it was unusual, well modelled and had no cliche in sight. I enjoyed your own layout at Manchester too, for the same reasons. Edit to add that the Doncaster Show is billed as the "Festival of British Railway Modelling", so a lack of overseas layouts shouldn't be a total surprise.

Once you get your head around not just having a rapid turnaround suburban service, you can add lots of variety without major alterations to the plan. A freight train can work in, just to drop a loco coal wagon off for the coal stage on the loco spur. Parcels vans, carriage trucks and horse boxes can be added and removed. You could have a gas tank for refilling the tanks on carriages. You can have ecs workings to an off stage set of carriage sidings, along with light engine moves to and from the nearby shed. Newspaper trains could come in and unload in the platforms. One day, mine will have a sequence that starts with newspaper trains and early morning workman's trains giving way to a rush hour, then some long distance train portions, to be attached to other portions along the line interspersed with local services, with perhaps a horse box special and a goods train swapping loco coal wagons and maybe dropping a couple of vans to be attached to passenger services for during the day. Then back to another rush hour and then some evening parcels and workman only services. That should give enough variety. I am sure I will think of others to add, like a steam railmotor or push pull shuttle service. The passenger trains can be handled in several different ways, as I have mentioned previously.

Thanks for the additional information and recollections. I thought it interesting that they measured up a Metropolitan Station to build a model of what would have been an MS&LR station! Probably "artistic license" for the filming. I can identify the A5 and the D11 easily enough but the tiny glimpse of the first train hasn't given me enough to say for sure what it is. The two carriages appear to have round tops to the door vents, which suggests Metropolitan Railway. The round spectacles and the suggestion of a smokebox numberplate have Midland Railway vibes. There look to be very short clips of two different locos, as one looks to have a different shape to the firebox. Such details matter little nearly 90 years later but I find them fascinating. Do you know if some of the pre war GCR stock appeared post war? If so, there is a better chance that some survives today. Tony Gee

That's the one. Many thanks and well done for finding it. Last time I tried to search the Huntley archives I couldn't find it but that was some time ago and they may have updated things since. Isn't it a wonderful look at how this hobby of ours was all those years ago. Lovely stuff!

I did find a 1930s film of Maybank that went into a lot more detail on the layout. It included a shot of it being transported to an exhibition in a lorry and also construction work on a loco, with what looked like a GCR 0-6-2T body being painted with an "old school" paint sprayer. I have looked for it again since but not been able to find it. It was probably in either the Pathe or Huntley archives. Maybank was very much a trailblazer in the hobby, especially as regards design and operation and if the Germans hadn't finished it off, it would have been worthy of preservation. I wonder if anything survived, even if just a loco or item of stock? Edit to add a link to the footagle which includes Buckingham. The loco, carriages and some of the buildings are still in regular use, 76 years later. https://www.britishpathe.com/asset/172501/

I have see that before and I am sure it is Maybank. The layout was altered regularly and this version does look like it is a through station rather than a terminus. There is also the briefest glimpse of Buckingham in the Pathe archives. There are a couple of very short shots of the Mk 1 layout, when the period was 1912 and the carriages were painted teak brown, at the 1948 MRC exhibition. It is a fascinating archive, with lots of good railway and model railway content.

You are quite correct. Pl 1 to 4 (as it was , it is now 3). They are the buildings at the South end. There is another to do, around the same length but not as complex or tall, for the North end. I have been looking through my various albums and have taken very few photos of the project. I will try to get some more. For the scale, the big problem is the width. From the front wall of the Plant to the wall alongside Pl 1 is 5ft 6ins to scale. Not easy to reach over that when it is down one side of a loft! The project is to scale length from St James Bridge to North Bridge. John has a 55ft long loft, so we don't struggle with the length. Shrinking it will actually probably result in a more balanced and visually appealing layout.

Thanks Mark, That is kind but you will be leaping ahead now. I used to visit John one day a week to work on his layout. All the points are built, the three signal boxes, St James Bridge is done and the Plant Works footbridge is nearly there. The fiddle yard baseboards are made and some track is laid in them and the first few boards for the scenic section are built. Then Covid hit, my visits stopped and so did progress. John (Phillips) has been talking about me starting up going again for the last two years but the workroom got used for storage and other purposes and it all needs sorting out before there is anywhere to work. I will be seeing John on Saturday at the Doncaster show. I will tell him what you are up to and it might kick him into gear. John did collect a huge amount of information, so if you are stuck for anything, let me know and I will see if he can help. I will follow your build with great interest. You may not remember but you and I met at the naming ceremony for Tornado, back in 2009. I used to knock about with Malcolm Crawley and he took me along as a guest. We chatted about you thoughts on doing a P2 next! Best wishes, Tony Gee

It has only been 50 years since it was decided to build it. You can't rush these things. Not much happened other than the gathering of information and stock for the first fortysomething. I am with you 100%. I would have lost interest and decided to model something less ambitious years (or decades) ago but I do admire those with the vision and staying power to keep going.

I agree with you. I chatted with one of the operators at a show, the first time I saw it in the continuous run form. I asked him why they had changed it. The answer was that they wanted to have a layout that was easier to run at shows, as every train terminating meant more work. I thought they had rather spoiled the layout, both down to the ratio of square feet of layout to fiddle yard and also in the operational interest.

That same dislike of sending trains to and from yourself was what led to the Automatic Crispin on Buckingham. By coincidence, I had a visit from the original Crispin yesterday. So here is a rather poor snap of him operating his dad's layout.

Does this look a bit familiar? I too have been asked to help with a model of Doncaster, this time set in the 1970s, in EM Gauge. These were built from a railway plan, which gave us the footprint, plus much brick counting and photograph taking! The roof arrangements took some sorting out, mainly from old aerial photos, plus Google Earth.

I find that I rarely operate any layout solo other than for testing, making repairs and such. I did operate Buckingham solo during lockdown but it was purely to keep the layout in good working order by polishing the switch contacts and not allowing mechanisms to get stiff. It wasn't nearly as much fun as the usual sessions with one or two friends. To me, the solo hobby is about making stuff and the operating is a social event shared with friends.

When you have a plan that flows nicely like that, it is very often because the points have been been handmade to suit the locations. I remember the article in the MRC annual very well. The layout was distinctly short of scenic work but I always thought it would have been an interesting one to operate, with a considerable length of run for a small space. What I cannot recall (and I don't have the annual to hand) is whether the points were proprietary or homemade.

In my view, Buckingham is like a Minories plus plus! It has all the extra working but these have to be fitted in between a very intensive passenger service. The timetable runs from early morning through to around midnight and there are very definite "rush hours" at the appropriate times, where an operator really has to be on their top form to keep things flowing. Then once the rush of commuter trains has subsided, you go into spells of long distance trains, parcel, freight and other workings. At "rush hour", there are trains that arrive, have a loco put on the back and are away again within 3 or 4 minutes, freeing the loco that brought the train in to be read to drop onto the back of the next one. So when you operate the layout, you see a lot of the sort of operation that CJF envisaged for Minories. As CJF and Peter Denny were good friends, sharing ideas on operation shouldn't be a surprise and I have often wondered if Minories was designed as a cut down mini Buckingham, as there was a version of Buckingham featuring this type of operation before CJF produced Minories. On Buckingham, the main local services are worked by a few sets of carriages. There is always a spare tank loco in a spur at the terminus ready to back on and take the train out. That is really the essence of the operation on Minories.

If you did away with the complex scissors plus slips station throat and replaced it with a couple of curved crossovers, you can do Buckingham with RTR track. At an exhibition a while ago, I was shown photos of a layout based fairly closely on Buckingham where somebody had done just that. Such a layout would be far more complex and physically bigger than Minories but the operational potential is many times greater. If you went for an earlier version, such as the double tracked version of Buckingham Mk. 2, it becomes even easier. However, Buckingham was never really about RTR. It was more about the freedom from being constrained by what was available commercially that you get by making things for yourself. When it was started in 1947 there was almost nothing you could buy that could be used, apart from rail, wheels and motors and a few castings for axle boxes and suchlike. Not relying on RTR is a philosophy that I have always liked and which I follow myself, so even when I build a layout that could be done with ready to lay points and track, I prefer to make my own, so it can be based on my chosen prototype.

As long as Thompson or Bulleid didn't get the job, we would have been OK. Written with tongue firmly in cheek in case anybody wants to get grumpy about it.

I agree with you. I have never suggested that any small terminus can be called a Minories. All I have said is that my own small terminus stations were inspired by Minories. That is a simple, indisputable fact I know to be true 'cos it was me that was inspired! I looked closely at the Minories design, chose which parts I liked and which I didn't and came up with a couple of layouts. To say they are Minories is wrong. To say they are nothing to do with Minories is equally wrong. They are just a variation on the design and calling them "inspired by" allows me to give some credit to CJF for the original plan and the inspiration.

I still have a landline and it surprises me how many times I get a scam/sales/nuisance call shortly after the line has been used for a real call, either inwards or outwards. It is as if the real call triggers the unwanted one. Of course phone providers have no vested interest in cutting out these calls. It is hard for them to justify reducing usage of their system. Do providers actually help generate nuisance calls by letting people know when a line has been active?

There are still a handful of kits showing as being in stock and available on the DJH website, so perhaps they haven't updated it. From a marketing point of view, it would make sense for Ellis Clark to let the world know that they have them. At the moment the kits are well buried on their website and if you hadn't been tipped off to look for them, you would have to get lucky to find them. I do wonder what sort of market there would be for many of the kits nowadays, especially those now available RTR but there were quite a few from DJH that have not yet been duplicated and those may well be missed by a bigger number of modellers.

I disagree. If you keep the same actual layout but organise the pointwork and platforms differently in terms of LH/RH/Y points and their radius, we are only doing what CF himself did and tinkering with the plan. The main feature of Minories was, to me, always the way it was operated, as a secondary double track terminus with a loco spur and no run round facilities. There is a very specific arrangements of the points to give arrivals and departures from all three platforms and possible simultaneous moves from certain combinations. Whether the platforms were curved, straight or had an S bend doesn't change any of that. The couple of layouts I have built may not be true Minories but they were directly influenced and inspired by the CJF plan and I am happy to call them a modified Minories, or Minories style. They would never have been built had the CJF Minories not have been published. Every time I have exhibited them, viewers have commented on the link to Minories, so there must be something there.

My personal choice, on the minories style layouts I have built, is to use larger radius points and straighten the plan. No matter how well it avoids reverse curves, small radius points and me do not get well together. They never look good to me other than in an industrial yard layout. The original out and back reverse curve was one of the aspects that I was not keen on. Even in that tight a space, it was not necessary and wasn't something I think a real railway would do in that sort of situation. So I am happy with the lines in and out being offset compared to the platforms and I have used a gently curving platform rather then a dead straight one, which appeals to my eyes. I have also moved the loco spur point nearer the first trailing crossover, which gives a nicer alignment and a longer siding, with no down side that I can see.

Or you can put DJH in the search box and they all appear.

Thanks for trying but I have been having another look and found them. As I said, it gives no clue as to whether they are going to produce any kits or if they are just selling off the remaining stock.

I have tried and failed to find stuff on their website. Their filter system beats me every time. Of course that could mean that they have just bought up the remaining stock and are selling them off.