Pacific231G

Of course they will though the one that comes immediately to my mind was in Paris. The former Bastille terminus was built entirely above street level off the end of a two kilometre long viaduct. A small sub shed for six tank locos was located alongside the train shed for the five passenger platforms. They kept a stockpile of coal in the vaulted arches under the shed. This shed was though very much more compact than Cyril Freezer's with no turntable (except a small one in its earliest years) and a simple grid of three tracks coming off the station throat. I agree with you though that in general only stabling points would be built on the very expensive land right next to the terminus with the actual MPD further down the line as at most of the London termini. Some of these stabling points were on viaducts such as at Ewer Street. However there are a couple of London prototypes for actual depots at hgh level. The London and Greenwich Railway had its loco depot at Deptford station where the viaduct arches were extended to accomodate it but that closed fairly early on A much better example was the SE&CR's Cannon Street depot. This was also built on a cramped appendix to the viaduct just before it crossed the river to Cannon Street Station. This was based on a turntable with five tracks fed from it in a semi-roundhouse fashion and the shed itself - though converted to other uses- can still be seen above Stoney Street. I strongly suspect it was this shed that inspired CJF's Cheapside Depot. In fact I've looked at the plan (see link below) and you could model the whole depot itself to scale in 4mm scale in a space of 4ftx 18 inches which is actually a bit smaller than CJF's Depot. It would be an amazing prototype as the shed itself butted directly onto other commercial premises and you've got busy London streets beneath it. There's more on this with a plan from 1914 at http://www.kentrail.org.uk/cannon_street_mpd.htm

That was a joke Ronnie so no need to disagree! When the SNCF's X3800 autorail was introduced in 1950 it rapidly acquired the nickname of "Picasso". That's generally assumed to be because the off-centre driving cab kiosk was thought to look a bit like one of Picasso's noses. That was though a feature of several early French diesel mechanical autorails where the driver had to sit over the engine to operate the gear box and clutch. In reality it seems that it was the number of experimental paint schemes tried on it early on that originally led to its nickname amongst railway workers that has stuck ever since. . Despite their slightly odd appearance these railcars were very successful for local services before they were withdrawn in the late 1980s and are still very popular with preserved and tourist lines. 251 of them were built between 1950 and 1961 and some 38 of them are still around including the one still in service with SNCF - X3997- which is used as a mobile track circuit testing vehicle.

If you simply flip Cheapside Depot you get this and avoid the facing crossover and entrance points so no FPLs rather than three. This seems better but still involves quite a lot of loco shunting on the main lines and you can't shunt into the shed entirely within the Depot board (I've avoided any points over the join between two 3'6" long baseboards) so I had a bit of a play and came up with this. Would this be more prototypical? Single slips weren't available in the Peco Streamline code 100 range that Cyril Freezer was probably still planning with but they are in the code 75 range. I've made it all so that depot and the TT will handle any loco up to a foot long (76ft in 4mm scale) and the shed will accomodate four tender locos or six tanks.

No, Bluebottle has tidied them up but I've got the original article from Model Railways in Sept 1981 and they're just as CJF drew them. It probably would make sense to reverse Cheapside Depot or rearrange the pointwork slightly as locomotives using it would mainly be coming to and from Minories to the the left.

Didn't Picasso ended up designing railcars for SNCF ? ;-)

Thanks Clive, that's very interesting. I'm rather inclined to see "Modern Image" as referring to a specific period in British Railway history rather than whatever is contemporary with where we happen to be in time. It's perhaps rather like "Modernism" in the arts which doesn't usually mean what's modern now but a particular movement that ran from roughly the late nineteenth to the first third of the twentieth century. Similarly, though it also doesn't have a definite end, I'd probably see "Modern Image" as running from Beeching (rather than the modernisation) to the end of the BR blue era. BTW I've recently acquired some very early Railway Modellers and at the start of 1952, a couple of months after Cyril Freezer had moved with the magazine to Peco from Ian Allan in London, he talked about his own modelling activities. It turns out that he was an EM gauge modeller who'd moved to it from 00. At the time of his move he was building an EM layout based on Ashburton. That would certainly explain his friendship with Peter Denny who was also an MRC member but, so far as I know, he never referred to it in print again. Since Peco was mostly selling products for 00, I wonder if Sydney Pritchard would have frowned on his editor championing EM. It does though give the lie to the idea of CJF as a proponent of "averageness" in modelling.

I'm actually not sure. Cyril Freezer coined the term "Modern Image" in 1963 soon after publication of the Beeching Report. That is now almost exactly as far in the past as the Grouping was then so that would make it very outdated On the other hand I can (just) remember the "traditional" railway of branch lines, local goods yards, unfitted goods trains and of course steam that was largely swept away to leave more or less the railway we now have. Even twenty years after the major changes of privatisation, I'd say that the railway now still has more in common with the railway of say the early 1970s than that did with the railways at the start of the 1960s. This is why I find the MOROP epochs more useful. They're not perfect as the divisions can be a bit arbitrary and would be harder to apply to Britain as nationalisation came much later here while the abandonment of local goods yards came much earlier as did the final abandonment of steam. The epochs overlap but I know that Ep III is post war steam and the start of the transition from steam to diesel, Ep IV is the final twilight of steam and the change to UIC coach and wagon markings and they're mainly useful for avoiding gross anachronisms whewn buying from manufacturers. Maybe though it's easier just to say what period your layout is set as in early 1960s, late 1980s etc.

Sadly that was often true in the 1960s and not just on branch lines. I can remember trains on the Oxford to Worcester line where a couple of passengers per coach was fairly typical. I did though once travel to Woodford Halse from Banbury on a Wednesday afternoon which I think was market day and the two coaches were absolutely packed.

I take great offence at such a suggestion. Even as a teenager I had a bath almost every month whether I needed one or not!! On passengers not getting on or off at termini, something that I think Peter Denny recommended was to have the platform facing away from the viewers (that was when Buckingham had a single platform and a bay) with the station building behind it. The train in the platform concealed the rather notable lack of doors opening and closing and the lack of SLF getting one and off

I travelled on an awful lot of steam trains in the early 1960s where I was almost the only passenger!!

Thanks for drawing those up Blubottle. They're clearer than CJF's original sketches! I wonder if his move to from Peco meant that he no longer felt obliged to base his plans on their standard trackwork. I've tried drawing "Blackfriars Junction" with Peco medium radius points, a curved point and a long crossover and it's doable but looks a bit awkward. With a bit less less approach trackwork than CJF's 4 ft by 18inch original, it is quite a large lump at about 42 inches by 16. With bespoke pointwork It would certainly be smoother but I'm not sure how much more compact using the same 36" (900mm) minimum radius. I rather suspect he was still using the dimensions of Peco track to get the overall sizes but smoothing the plans out for his sketches in MR. The idea of a layout made up of self contained but oddly shaped modules wasn't completely new. Inversnecky and Drambuie - R.W.G.Bryants early 2mm scale layout with each station stored in one of a variety of old musical instrument cases- was like that. There was a topic on it here last year and it's preserved at the NRM . CJF suggested for his 1981 version that, apart from the station buildings at Minories terminus, the modules would only include the track level of the viaducts with no scenery beyond. The viaduct parapets would form the edges of the baseboards so not even the arches would need to be modelled. It sounds a bit like the large scale layouts for live steam that appear at various shows. It's an interesting idea and I wonder how the public would react to such a radical departure from the railway in a landscape norm in a smaller scale. CJF was always rather good at questioning the current accepted modelling wisdom (even when he'd been largely responsible for it) as in suggesting a busy urban terminus in the space normally considered for a BLT.

Go up to a layout representing a European railway and complain in a loud voice that the trains are running on the left and if they can't even get that right the rest of the modelling can't be up to much. Hold your annual exhibition in a public event hall during the midwinter festival season and arrange for tickets to be sold from the same box office as the Christmas family show (I assume this was at the venue's insistence but it was very frustrating) Put the postcode of your clubhouse/ hon. sec. on your exhibtion publicity/website instead of that for the hall. You'll soon hear the throbbing of the tom toms.

Thaks for this Andy Tower Pier is one of my current favourite layouts though Geoff Ashdown didn't originally think it suitable for "general public" shows because it's in a cutting so difficult to see, operated by two people in front of the layout and "It is not possible to have something moving all the time which many feel is the mark of a good exhibition layout. Finescale shows though operate under a different ethos". I have seen it a couple of times at ExpoEM and Watford Finescale and, without the constant pressure to keep something moving all the time, Geoff did have plenty of time to discuss the layout with visitors. I don't think my photos do it justice but it's made up of three one metre by fifty centimetre open boxes with the left hand including the station itself, the right hand the cassette based fiddle yard and the middle one the throat including almost all the pointwork and the lever frame. The goods line is effetively a separate layout from the passenger station and I think it captures the feel of a tightly packed urban line to perfection. The operator sees it as it were from the signaller's point of view and it's operated with full block instruments. Geoff Ashdown has included some interesting ideas such as making the whole layout live and then using specific "handbrakes"- short isolated sections- for locos in all the places where a loco might legitimately stand. I've seen this on DC MPD layouts but not on a general one I also like the idea of making the throat effectively a separate scene as, although Geoff hasn't done this, it would enable the platforms and fiddle yard to be longer for exhibtions and shorter for home use. I think my next layout will be heavily influenced by it

In the original published article the goods version had a goods shed with an internal platform between the two sidings. They were accessed rather awkwardly from a headshunt that kicked back from platform 3. This always looked to me like an afterthought in the orginal version which was by the way designed as a five foot long layout for the new TT-3. The original Tri-ang range included a Jinty 060T and a couple of suburban coaches which, if you were prepared to accept a Jinty as a suburban tank loco, could have been used to operate Minories. I discussed Minories with Cyril Freezer a few years before he died and he told me that he far preferred his later idea of making the goods shed a kick back from a track parallel to platform 3. This also keeps the layout quite narrow and uses up the "wasted" space in front of the throat. These drawings are by the way eight feet long using Peco medium radius points which is longer than the original version that just about works if you use small radius points. In the 1981 article he reverted to the original passenger only plan though with longer platforms but added modules representing "Blackfriars junction" between the main line and a single track branch to a goods yard. Leadenhall Yard as that yard and Cheapside Depot as a smallish MPD alongside the main line. The idea was that the three additional pieces along with a couple of corner pieces could be assembled in any order and visually the whole thing was supposed to be on viaducts like the lines around London Bridge and Cannon Street so could be built without any scenery.

According to Cyril Freezer himself it was while studying the trackwork at Liverpool Street (Metropolitan Line) and doodling ideas that didn't require a double slip, which wasn't then available ready made, that he hit on the track formation of Minories. Minories seems to have come to mean any urban terminus with three platforms and a double track main line but Freezer's stroke of genius was to form each of the the two crossovers from a right and a left hand turnout arranged with the two right hands back to back. This means that between each of the three platform roads and either main line track there is a single and mostly fairly easy reverse curve to take: only a train arriving on platform one from the up line (if this is the London terminus) has to negotiate a reverse curve through two turnouts immediately after one another. For all other movements the reverse curves are separated by at least the length of a turnout. Both CJF's and a traditional straight arrangement achieve the same thing in the same length of two crossovers but you can see that on the straight version the reverse curves are all fairly sharp while a train departing from platform 3 has to negotiate a double reverse curve.. Freezer's plan also makes this fairly simple throat look more complicated and busy which is surely an advantage when representing an urban terminus. The limitation of both these plans for a busy commuter terminus is that you can only have simultaneous arrivals and departures if platform one is the departure platform. If you add an extra track connecting the up line and platform three you can have simultaneous arrivals and departures using platforms two and three as well. This enables a really intense rush hour service to be run with trains departing onto the down line in the platform order 3,2,1 and arriving trains filling each platform from the up line as soon as it is free. If trains are loco hauled and not push-pull that could make it very challenging to work in order to get locos from arriving trains onto the next available departure.

What? The action was supposed to be taking place in the Est region yet from the architecture of the stations "Rive-Reine" and "St.Avold" they were clearly on the C.F. Orleans-Rouen, We saw Burt Lancaster sabotaging a stretch of bullhead which the Est didn't use and just exactly what was a CF de l'Ouest 030C doing so far east of Paris ?? I'm not serious of course as the film makers, and the SNCF people they worked with, did go out of their way to be as accurate as possible and, unless you're an expert, French railway architecture tends to follow fairly common overall designs. What did surprise me when I looked into the film a bit was that though the main scenes were filmed on lines south of Rouen, well away from the places like Verdun, Metz and Pont a Mousson depicted, the main locomotives used were Est 230Bs. These must have been brought over specially, presumably just before scrapping. Given that at that time there were plenty of steam locos being retired more locally on the Western region, someone clearly went out of their way to get that bit right. "The Train" is one of my favourite movies and in 2008 I wrote an article about Acquigny, the real location used for "Rive-Reine", and the film's other locations for the SNCF Society. It's here if you're interested http://myweb.tiscali.co.uk/peclegg/sncf/articles/article_2008_07.html . Sadly though, the paper trains no longer run through Acquigny since RFF demanded a small fortune from the paper company for track renewal (though not as much as was then required to build a new autoroute junction for all the extra lorries that replaced the trains) and when I passed that way a year ago the line was gently rusting again. Most of the locations used for fillming "The Train" can still be found . The movie is, perhaps surprisingly, based loosely on a real though not nearly so dramatic incident just before the liberation of Paris. Some of the sequences depicting the actions to delay the train were based on those in "Bataille de Rail". This was a sort of drama documentary made immediately after the occupation when the railway infrastructure was still being repaired. It painted a posibly rather idealised picture of the activities of Resistance Fer and does show French railway operating methods at that time extremely well.

Very interesting plan Colin. I used to park on the former platforms of Terminus when I worked in South Western House in the 1980s and when I was first there the platform canopie were still there so you could imagine it as a station. I think your plan catches the essence of it very well despite the necessary simplification. One question. If you're modelling 1943-1966 what will you do about the trams that I believe ran until 1949? ISTR that they had a very distinctively rounded roof section to get through the Bargate arch. I don't know when the tracks were tarred over.

Your memory is quite correct. That is still the arrangement at Windsor Riverside though I think it used to have a third platform face. if you don't use a scissors a pair of crossovers is the minimum length that allows you to handle departures and arrivals from a double track line on more than one platform. If you arrange the crossovers the right way round though a the third platform doesn't requre any more length in the throat. That's what CJF did with the original Minories but with the two crossovers arranged in a particularly clever way.

They used to have a similarly arcane system in the Mensa DLF (Dopolavoro Ferroviario) restaurant behind Stazione Termini in Rome. You had to look at the counters to see what you wanted then buy tickets for the various items from the stunningly attractive but extremely sour cashier. You then took these to the counter and got the dishes you wanted and if you decided you wanted something else you had to either forgo it or accept a cold meal (on top of the cold welcome) The mensa DLFs were/are an odd institution as they were essentially canteens for railway workers run by their social and cultural organisation but seemed generally open to the public - well they never turned me away- and about half the price of any other restaurant but with really good food. As a student travelling on a rail pass during the1970s when money was very short I ate at the one in Rome several times and later while touring Italy by train out of season used several of them along with the occasional University mensa. That included the one in Rome and sourpuss was just as beautiful and just as miserable five years later. Perhaps she was trying to get into CineCitta as a starlet and failing.

Paul. What happened to the large collection of glass plate negatives and prints that had been gently deteriorating underneath Paddington Station that OPC took over from BR in the early1980s? I know they were in the Bournemouth shop because soon after they arrived there I spent a day making a film about them for the local BBC South Today programme. We focussed on the carriage print views which the GWR encouraged their official photographers to take with their spare plates after recording a new culvert, goods shed or whatever. The Swanage Railway supplied us with a train that ran up and down just north of Swanage so that my reporter could do the opening PTC in a compartment with carriage prints. I remember a mad dash back to Bournemouth from Swanage to get enough time to film the collection and an interview - with you?- which we did in a room in the shop. I'd had the impression that OPC had agreed a publishing deal with BR to make use of the collection and that involved conserving them. I don't remember anyone saying they were part of the NRM collection but may have missed that while we were filming. AFAIR the vast majority of what we saw was GWR. The film may still exist but I've no way of getting hold of it if it does. I did go into Motorbooks last week between meetings in London and, partly for old times sake, bought one half price book by a French loco driver

Shame they're closing. They used to stock some difficult to find French books like the the FACS series (technically a magazine but in those days more like the Oakwood Press books) and most of my collection of these came from Cecil Court. I'd found visits less rewarding recently but used to spend quite a lot of time browsing there.

I agree about Bradfield G.S. Having been impressed by the photos and videos here from The Laird (John Elliot) and the articles in MRJ I finally saw it for myself under its new management at the Chiltern Association modeller's day earlier in the summer. It was every bit as good as I'd hoped. It's an excellent layout and inspiring as it is the work of one person. I got similar inspiration from Geoff Ashdown's Tower Pier and that's only 3 metres long including the fiddle yard.

Thanks for posting these Jon, It looks like an interesting visit. The 2-10-0 150P13 was at the CF Baie de Somme's Fête de la Vapeur at the end of April. Though not of course in steam, its bearings and running gear must be in fairly good nick as It was hauled the hundred or so miles there and back to Mohon mostly I think along secondary lines which must have been worth seeing. I only saw it in Noyelles yard but it was run along the SG line to and from St. Valery Canal. I found this picture of it on the Fête website http://www.fetevapeur.fr/images/stories/20130426/9.jpg and there are a few more more in the section Festival "Off" on http://www.fetevapeur.fr/

The late Carl Arendt came up with the "Cat-Skills RR" a Christmas layout designed specifically to entertain cats. http://www.carendt.com/scrapbook/page30/ Possibly a good use for old but not collectable toy trains though I suspect any self respecting cat would always prefer to pounce on several thousand pounds worth of Fulgurex !!

Big thanks to CMRA's organisers for a great day on Saturday- very different from a public exhibition. Thanks to its new owners I finally got to see Bradfield Gloucester Square and wasn't disappointed