kitpw

Great stuff... I visited Peter Denny and the Buckingham Branch Lines a few times and marvelled at the automatic Crispin amongst many other aspects of a remarkable model railway. I have a Pi sitting in its box waiting for inspiration to outweigh trepidation - your AC at St Petrock might well prove decisive in getting it in to service. So far (at Swan Hill) I've spent hours wiring relays and switches just to shuffle four controllers between 4 sections of the layout and get 11 sets of points to repsond to switches in the signal box so I'm having a holiday from wires and solder tags for a while but I will follow developments at St Petrock with interest! KitPW

Hi Harlequin (don't know if I reply on this form or somewhere else - let me know if I'm doing the wrong thing!) ...operation, that's a good question. It's noted in “Branch Lines of West London” (Mitchell & Smith, Middleton Press) that one or two vans with fresh produce arrived at Vine St early and were left on the buffer stops during the day - not moved to the goods yard. At Swan Hill, these arriving vans will be moved to the up siding and unloaded/loaded there rather than on the passenger platform. That traffic could include parcels, horseboxes and similar, perhaps not just early, but during the day as well and so a shunting spur and dock is provided: all “brown vehicle” activities. This is more like operations at Windsor where the goods shed was sited next to the passenger station whilst the goods yard was at the lower level, accessed on a steeply graded double reversal from the station - I've effectively subsituted the reversal arrangement at Windsor for the goods yard at Vine Street. I have it half in mind that the reversal siding at Swan Hill could also provide a “bay” platform for a single coach push-pull service running to and from the mainline junction (the platform widens at the stop end) and perhaps accomodation for the odd spare carriage or saloon car when required to be added to an outgoing train. It may be necessary to provide a pilot engine – its shed will be in part 2, off scene for now – and signalling to make all that happen! I particularly like the early GWR horseboxes and have an N5 under construction - progress being made on days like today when the railway workshop is too cold for comfort - photo attached...

Swan Hill is the terminus of a short, double track commuter branch off the GWR in the vicinity of Langley, imagined/modelled in 7mm. The last mile or so of the branch, including Swan Hill station, is carried on viaduct – Windsor comes to mind. The track plan owes something to Uxbridge Vine Street but with only a down siding for reversing into a goods yard (as per Windsor but off scene) and an up siding, shunting spur and dock. There is a single passenger platform serving arrival and departure roads. As at Uxbridge, there is no engine release crossover, so trains reverse and run round outside the station and in doing so, move from part 1 of the model - the station - to part 2 which will be in an adjacent covered area and may never consist of more than a sector table. As there is little room for much width to the model (it's basically 600mm wide), height has been used instead, thus the viaduct. The dotted lines on the drawing show roads and lanes under the viaduct based pretty closely on Fenchurch Street/Crutched Friars (wrong company but never mind) with pubs and other enterprises waiting to be installed underneath. It is not intended to develop goods facilites at ground level – these are “off scene” allowing goods trains to appear and reverse into part 2. It is planned that there will be sufficient building appearing above the viaduct formation level to give the impression of a very constrained town centre site where the road and building layout pre-existed the GWR's intervention in providing the citizens of Swan Hill with a railway station. edited 15/02/22 to restore photos and plan of the layout.

...thanks for encouraging comments - I'll post more info/pics when to hand - maybe even later today! KitPW

On a cold and damp Saturday and having viewed with huge interest various blogs on RMWeb over the last year or two and having revived a family tradition of building model railways, I decided it was high time to dip a toe in the water and share - with trepidation - the state of play on Swan Hill, a GWR terminus station somewhere in the Thames Valley and sometime in the 1920s. The photo shows the extent of trackwork on Swan Hill as of about three months ago. If the start of this blog shows up OK on the website, I'll elaborate on the track plan and add some detail as to what has been built so far and what is intended - I'll add some up to date photos as well. It's worth mentioning that even this much progress on the layout has taken about 2 years as full time work gave way to part time retirement and, more recently, to more full time modelling. The stock, such as it is, was started some 25 years ago - a scratch built Dean Goods, a Vulcan 57xx pannier and various trucks and vans were completed (and now need upgrading and repair) and a splendid Slater's clerestory coach which is sitting in front of me now, still incomplete after all this time but shortly to be worked on. So back at Swan Hill.....