Tony Cane

Your proposal that the line to the yard was built during WWII reminds me of an anecdote about the line to Limington during WWII. A senior American Army officer tasked with loading elements of his command at Lymington for the D-Day landings, was appalled at the facilities he had to work with. Having been assured that the railway authorities would give him every assistance possible, he called a meeting of relevant parties, to get an urgent upgrade of the railway. Having expressed how inadequate this twisting single track line with limited siding space was he insisted that something had to be done. The railway officials explained the history of the line and  that it was built as cheaply as possible and was perfectly adequate for peace time traffic and could not see how it could be significantly upgraded in the time available. The American officer was having none of this. He spread out a map ,lined up a ruler between Brockenhurst and Lymington , drew a straight line and said “that is the route of the new line we start building it tomorrow”.  As D-Day was a success I assume he found an alternative way of getting the “facilities” to meet his requirement !!!!

You plan includes various small landing craft in the layout. While these are available as kits the cheapest are typically 1/72 scale, so slightly over scale. There are more expensive kits, typically resin, to 1/76 scale which may be more suitable for the limited space on the layout. As a further thought the LCVP, at least, is available in 1/87 scale, which may be useful  in fitting in the model. The attached picture shows a model I built of the, again relatively expensive, resin kit in this scale.

I very much like the concept of the layout as designed and applaud the use of a WWII setting. I have two observations that may be of use. Firstly the switching of the diamond crossing. When I have needed to do this I have used an adjacent point to switch the polarity of the frogs. For example if on your panel P3 is switched to the orange route then the frogs on the diamond are also changed to the correct polarity for that route, and restored to the purple route when P3 is restored to its more normal state. Two single pole change over switches are needed, and if the point motor only has one then this can be used to switch a suitable relay.

As to possible locomotives you are not limited to SR types. Many locomotives were transferred due to wartime traffic requirements and could be found working far from their normal area of operation. An extreme example being the use of a SR 0-4-2T D tank as station pilot at Wick in Scotland.

As it happens I am just in middle of constructing a Chivers kit of the same vehicle, this is the progress so far.

This was a one of trial, with I believe observation from the air to see how effective it was.

There are 13 negatives in the Imperial War Museum collection IWM NEG H25189 TO H25201, dated November 7th 1942

No wishing to add to the high jacking of this thread I have started a new one entitled “WWII tank transport by rail”. Links to all three of the films listed above are published there.

Here is my attempt at reproducing the weathering in the photograph.

The picture of the empty warflat is a screen capture from a video. The Army film unit did a series of training films on the loading and unloading of tanks to and from warflats. The films were shot at Longmoor and used Covenanter and Churchill tanks. Some years ago a video tape compilation of these films was produced by the Heritage magazine. Fortunately 3 of them were on the internet at one time, but I can no longer trace the source. I have downloaded copies of these and have uploaded the most relevant one to Youtube. The description is Tanks by Train End loading dock, the URL is

https://youtu.be/ZvUdYcE3tT4

This shows all aspects of the process, the other two I have are on the preparation of the Covenanter tanks for loading and the procedure for using the ramp wagon.

Good point.

Here is a picture of an in use warflat. The edges, where the tracks run, are visibly lighter.