t-b-g

1 hour ago, Darwinian said:

 

You could read that as the modelling being of railways by Britons. As opposed to Festival of modelling British railways. So no reason not to have railways modelled on non-british prototypes.

 

Personally It's very much the quality of the model making, including the scenery, rather than the subject matter that appeals. I really liked the OPs Chinese layout when I saw it a few years ago. Variety is good even if I don't know anything about the system being modelled. 

But then I model the ex. Rhymney Railway in 1929-32 so I see very few layouts that go with my particular interests!

 

The only times I have seen layouts depicting the former LD&ECR lines in GCR days have been my own. I fully expect to not see layouts the portray my chosen prototype when I go to shows. I enjoy going off the beaten track with my modelling and if it means making everything rather than using RTR models, that suits me.

When BRM started, as a new magazine all those years ago, the intention stated was that it would cover modelling of British prototypes. I don't know if this has ever changed but I can't recall much non UK content in the magazine, if any. I don't buy it regularly so I may have missed some. The early shows at Doncaster had layouts that had appeared in the magazine and were very much BRM shows. Again, I don't know if this is still the case but a good number of the layouts at Doncaster have been in BRM. There may have been non UK based layouts at Doncaster in previous years but I struggle to recall any and if there have been some the number is tiny. So I based my comment about it not being surprising that the show was UK focused on that. It was based on my observation of BRM and previous Doncaster shows. The title of the show is based on the title of the magazine, which is for modelling of British prototypes.

So I would be surprised to turn up at Doncaster and see loads of non UK layouts.

41 minutes ago, 298 said:

 

The buildings were a bit anonymous then,  should I name the hotel "El Nido" (the Nest) and model a Vacuum cleaner shop..?

(From 007's "No time to die" and "Our Man in Havana")

I wouldn't have picked up on those references. Way over my head! I did enjoy the cultural references on a layout set in the USA I saw a few years ago. Two commercial premises were next door to each other. One has a sign up "Trailors for sale or rent" and the one next door had "Rooms to let, 50 cents".

9 hours ago, D-A-T said:

 

Bradfield Gloucester Square springs to mind. Lots of videos on YouTube showing the variety of traffic and the ebb and flow during the day.

 

I saw Bradfield a few times at shows. If it had been GCR pregrouping steam, to would have been perfection to my eyes. As it was, it was superb and well worth watching for a long time.

I tried something like this and although I could see well enough, I didn't like having the weight on the front of my head for very long. I ended up asking my opticians to make me some prescription glasses for close up work. These were much better. I also have some lightweight clip on magnifiers from a firm called Opticaid, which allow me to do really fine work better than I ever could with just my eyes.

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.

2 hours ago, Izzy said:

I'm of the opinion that in the early days most layouts placed operational use at the forefront of their designs with just mostly token scenery within the railway boundary unlike today where the opposite often exists with many and the railway side seems almost incidental to the scenic one. 

 

To my mind Minories falls into the former category and I still often think I would like to build a minimal size version but get stuck at wanting to expand the range of trains to make it more interesting to operate. How to do so without expanding the track design much or having more platforms. Different types of traffic rather than just more of the same. That would I feel get boring to operate quite quickly for a lone modeller such as myself.

 

Bob

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. 

31 minutes ago, Metropolitan H said:

We had a similar discussion regarding "Maybank" and the later - post WW2 - "Maycroft" about a year and a bit ago.

 

Not only was there an early article in a 1934 issue of the Model Railway News, there was a later 5 page article by Bernard Wright (of S gauge Swanage fame) in the December 1975 issue of "Model Railways", including a picture of one of the garden sheds erected as part of the garden railway displays at the post war MRC shows. While "Maybank" was a collabrative effort by Bill Banwell and Frank Applegate, the later stood himself down from circa 1949 - after which Bill Banwell's main collabarator was Geoff Bigmore.

 

By the way when the two lads are seen running off to watch the train pass I believe the scene to have been shot a little to the south of Chorleywood Station - which is the location of the scene in which Bill and Frank are seen measuring up the ex"Metropolitan Railway" signal box.

 

Regards

Chris H

 

P.S. - The last showing of a "Maycroft" layout at the MRC Easter exhibition was 1966 - I visited as a teenager and still remember how good it was.

 

CH

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

1 hour ago, MartinRS said:

Is this what you saw? https://www.huntleyarchives.com/results.asp?txtkeys1=Maybank model railway

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!

2 hours ago, Pacific231G said:

No doubt at all Tony, especially as you can recognise the two of them in the later shot showing the MPD whose plan is the same as when it was high level.

The very first shot with the inbound line coming out of the tunnel on a curve, suggests a return balloon loop and I assume they'd turned the layout into a dumb-bell. That would have enabled a continuous flow of trains and "keep something moving for visitors" and that appears to be what we're seeing them doing in that shot with  expresses whizzing through Maybank station. I think the viaduct may also have been an extension to the right hand side as it looks like one of their GCR trains. I  would have found it far less fascinating in that mode and their original way of showing it as a terminus was to set up the storage roads and run a twenty minute timetabled sequence every hour.

I wonder what it would cost to licence the films at full resolution from Pathé   

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/

14 minutes ago, Pacific231G said:

 

I had the same conversation with Tom Cunnington, possibly at the same show, and he said that it was mainly to enable goods trains to be used and that passenger trains would still terminate but whether that policy survived the pressures of exhibition running I couldn't say. 

Tom did let me have a go at operating the terminus end of Minories (GC) at a show a few years ago and, even with a second operator handling the fiddle yard, keeping the turnover sequence going without getting into knots would certainly require a great deal of concentration over the course of an exhibition day. 

 

Strangely enough, I found a Pathé News film preview of the 1938 MRC shows and there was a layout with a through station that looked rather familiar.

 

Eventually, the penny  dropped and I realised it was the 0 gauge Maybank Layout. Railway company demo displays aside, this was the first published or exhibited main line terminus to fiddle yard layout. It was built by Bill Banwell and Frank Applegate and first exhibited in 1933. It was later described by Cyril Freezer, who was fascinated by it at one of the MRC shows,  as "The first of the moderns" and was undoubtedly a major inspiration for Minories.

This is the layout at the 1937 MRC show. 

Maybank was a four platform terminus with a high level MPD hiding a motorised four road sector plate set of storage sidings. They seem to have added a return loop to that end at some stage but, in this screen grab, you can see that the two centre roads have been extended onto what I assume is another return loop. Another shot in the newsreel suggest that they had also brought the MPD down to ground level. 

Messrs. Banwell and Applegate were both members of the MRC - the Maybank was a regular feature at its Easter show from 1934 until the war (it didn't survive the Blitz) and, as the layout was an imaginary GCR terminus set somewhere on the east coast, I assume it was also an influence on Happisburgh.   

 

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.

12 hours ago, LNER4479 said:

Thanks Tony - impressive work.

 

I take it those are the buildings on Platform 1-3? And to scale? We unfortunately are having to compromise in both length and width - both up and down island platforms will be shorter and (particularly) narrower than they should be.

 

Feel free to share any further images of your work on 'Doncaster 1970'.

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. 

45 minutes ago, Mark Allatt said:

Thanks for sharing - looks fantastic. We must keep in touch as our projects progress. You are much further on than we are!

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

10 hours ago, gr.king said:

Whilst it is very clearly being built to a commendably high standard with maximum possible authenticity, the number of years since Doncaster 1970 was conceived and started, plus the number of years it will probably still take before it becomes even a reasonably complete/convincing working model would be entirely beyond my patience/interest/attention span.  Credit is due to those who can tolerate such a long gestation period.

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.

28 minutes ago, Nearholmer said:

Yes, it’s, er, how shall we say, rather unengaging as an exhibition piece, far too high ratio off-stage-to-on-stage. Before the MRC made it into a circuit, it was a very good classic Minories.

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. 

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.

21 minutes ago, Nearholmer said:

Now this has departed from Minories on a short(?) excursion, can I raise something that has always made me wonder about these more complex model termini?

 

Would you really want to operate one on your own? 
 

I seriously wonder, because unless the capacity is effectively wasted, by running very few trains, the intensity of operation of a steam age, particularly pre-grouping, terminus ramps-up significantly as the number of platforms increases. TBH, keeping the show on the road with just a two platform terminus at each end of the run on my former layout was enough to keep me entertained, by the time light engine movements, adding and detaching vans, and shunting the daily goods train were included. For a one person layout, while I’d have loved to expand to allow better goods siding provision, and some carriage stabling, I’m not sure I would want to go significantly more complex topologically.

 

 

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.

25 minutes ago, RobinofLoxley said:

I admire the drafting of the track plan part. Sometimes it isnt clear what kind of turnout is used in a particular location, adds to the fun of trying to draft it in Anyrail.

 

The appearance is very reminiscent of the original Minories plan; drwing style, paper, etc...

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.

25 minutes ago, simon b said:

 

If you take out the complex trackwork it becomes close to this: 

 

 

Just to be clear I'm not knocking Buckingham, for what they had to work with back then it's a work of art. But it doesn't come across as an intensive worked commuter terminus which is what Minories set out to represent, with all the extras it has the operation moves to something else. 

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.

9 hours ago, simon b said:

That was a good way to design a layout. Operate it with a few freinds, or leave the route set to act as a return loop for solo operation.

 

The above plan is a winner as it seems perfectly doable with off the shelf track, that's where something like Buckingham falls down.

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. 

1 hour ago, rodent279 said:

What if, just suppose, the LNER had gone with Robinson as CME, and he persevered fire a few years, then retired in say 1926-7? Is it beyond the realms of possibility that Stanier could have made the move from Swindon a few years earlier, and gone to Doncaster?

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.

20 minutes ago, Flying Pig said:

 

Yeah but...

 

The specific arrangement of the points, 'Minories Eye' apart, is just two crossovers and a bay, which is not quite as basic as possible, but not far off and nothing particular to celebrate.  The lack of runround and use of a pilot isn't particularly innovative either.

 

And the operation CJF designed it around was high intensity suburban working, like a sliver of Liverpool Street, with a rapid procession of very similar trains, not requiring much stock*.  This is relatively rare to see in model form, most operators choosing a more varied mixed secondary terminus mode as you describe.  (*Possibly with the very limited Triang TT-3 range in mind.)

 

So all I'm saying is that  perhaps we should not be quite so quick to deploy the Minories tag whenever a smallish terminus appears.

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?

1 hour ago, Tony Wright said:

Having just phoned DJH, I can confirm that all the firm's loco kits, in all scales, have been sold/passed on to Ellis Clark. 

 

Since I have no contact with the latter firm, I have no idea whether there'll be any new kits or not. 

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.

14 minutes ago, Flying Pig said:

 

 

Once you dispense with the signature feature, applying the name Minories (even Minories-style) to a plan seems inappropriate to me, since nothing else in Minories is really original enough to deserve the name.  It gets to the point where every plan between BLT and mahoosive is labelled Minories, which imo makes the term so vague as to be almost meaningless.

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.