Chandwell

So after finishing the viaduct build last week, my attention has turned to the next project. I want to get the river finished this year, so it makes sense to move onto the next bridge. This one will be an old road bridge that will carry the road that passes under the skew arch in the viaduct, here: I am going to base the bridge on one in a town near me, Otley. It was built in the 11th century and has a lot of character. It is a very low bridge which will suit my layout well as I want the road to be lower than the bases of the arch workshops to the right, and to ascend towards the back of the baseboard. I have a small challenge though as the road leaves the baseboard at 45 degrees to the front, and I only have space to model a quarter of the length of the bridge. This means it will be chopped off at 45 degrees in the middle of one of the arches. I have worked out how to build it so that this will be ok. Here’s a mock up I made: The design of the bridge is progressing. I use the application Inkscape to do my builds. Here is progress so far. I found an excellent PDF document online from a survey of the bridge done for Leeds City Council who is responsible for the maintenance of the bridge, so I have the exact measurements of the parts that I need. There are also loads of pictures of the real thing online, so I should be able to make a good go of it. I made a video this week of how I use Inkscape in my scratch builds to show some of the absolute basics of the application. It’s below if it is of any interest.

Thank you Simon! I'm pleased the feel is of the area I was aiming for. Up to now I've just been using old locos and stock that have survived the 25-30 years since my layout as a teenager, but my thoughts are starting to turn to updating things a little. I remember travelling the Settle-Carlisle in blue & grey coaches hauled by a class 31, so I've got one of those and a rake of Mk 1's on order, as a start. I have an ancient large logo Class 47 so a rake of mk 2s would look great behind that.

Thanks for the good comments, everyone! It keeps me going. The station end is a bit up in the air at the moment. But broad plans include a lot of tall warehousing/industry behind the station. I am torn between one long mill/works-type building like you see behind the station at Doncaster, or more individual buildings all crammed together in layers to give the impression of a large complex that may have grown up over time, or then again... something akin to the faded grandeur of the Little Germany quarter in Bradford. Then... the station building itself will be ultra low-relief on the right. In front of the tracks will be more station buildings, parcel office etc. and then the high street descending the hill towards the first wide arch. This will have a large hotel, probably based on the Scalescenes kit, but built around a 90 degree curve - a crescent hotel like you see near the station in Leeds, and on the main street of Illkley. The backs of these buildings will back onto the already-laid cobbled backstreet below the station. I'm starting on the station area next year probably, and expect it to take all year - I don't get much modelling time, and this layout is going to be about 85% scratch-built buildings. I am starting the road bridge that will go over the river this week, and next month, probably the river itself.

Another week has gone past and I have finally finished the building of the viaduct... It has taken me seven months, but I am really pleased with how it turned out. Here is a couple of pictures of the completed last three arches: I had a bit of a disaster with the varnish this week. I use enamel brush-on varnish. I always give it a coat of gloss followed by matt, as I find that adding matt first leaves the matting agent as a dusty covering. Anyway, this time I must have had some smudged PVA on the surface of something as it left a light blob clearly visible on the surface of one of the piers... This has never happened before, so I don’t really know what was up. Anyway, I dabbed on some various shades of brown paint and to the naked eye, especially at normal viewing distances, it is no longer noticeable. I also had to replace a point this week as one of the blades came disconnected from the tie bar and I could not work out how to reconnect it, eventually destroying it further with my ham-fisted attempts to get it clipped back in. Thankfully it was a point where I have not yet ballasted, and it was connected with the plastic insulating rail joiners. So I could cut it out with a craft knife and carefully glue another one in place after re-soldering the wires to it. Not sure how it came unclipped. Perhaps some over-zealous track cleaning or something. I need to be more careful. I am really pleased with how the viaduct has turned out but there are still a lot of things I wish I had done better. I am going to make a video of these things to help others avoid my mistakes. It does look quite nice though, if you don’t look too closely! As usual, I have made a video that details how I made the last three arches. It’s below if you’re interested. Are you interested? I am never sure if it’s good practice to link to videos from here... don’t want to annoy folks.

Like most people, I love the Minories plan. You have some neat components there. Looking forward to seeing more!

I’ve not had much time on the layout this week, but I have made some progress on the last three arches. For the first time, the viaduct now spans all the way from the station to the hillside. The cores are in and the face is on. Just the inner walls, buttresses, sills, ledge, and walls to go. I always think it looks scruffy at this stage, but it usually works out in the end. I’m not happy with the way the tops of the arches look, but I am hoping that once the finishing bits are on it won’t look too bad. I have also downloaded a new app for editing videos. Called LumaFusion, it is quite a complicated piece of work. To try to learn my way around it, I made a short ‘trailer’ for my YouTube channel. I may have overdone it a little, but it was great fun to make. My ten-year-old son did the filming.

Definitely - you can get a lot into a small place!

Hi Ben, I was inspired by Horseley Fields many years ago and had your layout topic in my bookmark for years. So thank you very much indeed for that! Chandwell’s fiddle yard is a metre long - just enough space to squeeze a loco with five coaches. I have made cassettes from cable trunking and incorporated a power cut off on the section leading to them. Power simply travels from an exposed wire and round some copper tape. It is quite a basic and rudimentary setup. The cassettes were featured in my very first, very unconfident, YouTube video, so you can see them under construction.

I have spent this weekend working on the last three arches of the viaduct that I have been working on all year. I’m using the same technique as the rest of the viaduct. I make a simple box with an arch and then place this under the track bed. I place the boxes in the curve and then fit the front and rear of the viaduct once they are in place, the piers being wider on the back face obviously. This allows me to slide them under before lifting them up to the correct height. Here are the last three arches in situ under the track, before being lifted up 5mm to the base of the track. These three arches are slightly different to the rest as they are on the start of the junction, so they widen towards the fiddleyard: I don’t think that this is very prototypical but I really wanted to have these three arches rather than just an embankment. The arches at Brixton seem to have this pattern but I have not been able to find and photos of the interior of them, so I don’t know how they would have been constructed. I’ve therefore built these three arches out of six boxes. There will be an angle change in the middle of each arch, which I assume would have some kind of vaulted ceiling in the arch. I have no idea if this was ever a thing, but it will be hardly noticeable once finished. That is as far as I have got. Here are some pictures of the other arches which I built using the same method. The larger arch in the middle is a skew arch and will have a road running through it. I made a video about this, here:

I think the curve is probably as tight as I could get away with, but in the flesh, it works nicely and doesn’t look too bad. It seems like a decent compromise between realism and available space. @scottystitch beat me to posting the video, but there is an overview of the plan and my reasoning behind it in that video (thanks Scott) I’m drawing the track plan over time in an iPad app called Vectornator. The original track outline was imported into it from AnyRail, and since that was used to actually lay the track, I think it is dead accurate as a representation of the real layout. It is here if it is of interest...

Thank you for the comments and I am really pleased you’ve seen the layout on YouTube! The track radius varies through the curve slightly, but at its tightest, it is the same as two Peco Code 55 curved points back to back. It looks really tight when you see it like this: On average through the curve, the radius of the inner track is 618mm, or just over 24 inches.

Thanks for the comments, everyone. Duncan, here are the tunnels... And the as yet unfinished station area...

Hello everyone. I am Michael and I've lurked around RMWeb for about eight years, but have never posted. It's a site full of inspiration but I've never been confident enough to write my own layout topic. That's changing today. I hope I've got it in the right place. I wasn't sure whether a topic like this was the right thing, or a blog. I'm sure comments will keep me right! Chandwell is an N Gauge layout that goes around two two-metre walls of my garage. The track plan is very roughly based on that of Bradford Interchange - I copied the sequence of points from Google Maps. There are two double-track lines coming out of tunnel portals and crossing a three-track curved viaduct before entering a four-platform station with a loco release loop and a stabling siding. I started the layout in March 2019 and do what I can, when I can. I usually work away from home a lot, so forced home-working has given me many more evenings to work on the layout recently. I will use this topic to show progress of the layout as and when I finish bits. The latest part to be finished is the iron arch bridge which will cross the river. I based this on a bridge near Dewsbury and is my first true scratch-build... everything else has been kitbashing Scalescenes kits up to now. This bridge is made of nine arches, each one made from 0.5mm greyboard. I designed the structure myself using Inkscape from photos I took of the prototype, Long Cut End Viaduct Bridge. Each arch took 40 minutes just to cut out. I also post videos of my layout's progress on YouTube, so you can see more of this bridge over there, if you're interested. Hopefully there is a link in my signature... I am hoping for constructive advice from the members of RMWeb as I post updates over the coming weeks and months.

I often get a comment such as “great vid... can we be friends” or whatever within seconds of posting a new video. These tend to be bots enticing you to subscribe to channels which are then sold to become pre-built channels with loads of subscribers. I’ve never heard of one comment including details of a video before it is public; I don’t think that can be accurate, but it always pays to be wary of unusual comments/commenters.

I saw this layout at Doncaster on the quiet Sunday a couple of weeks back, and have really enjoyed reading through this and seeing it come to life. You spent ages with my son shunting a train, and he really enjoyed it. Thank you for that - it was a highlight of the show.