Pacific231G

I agree and I'd love to see the layout again, even though, sadly, without Geoff.

Not very high though mallards have been reported to fly as high as 21 000 ft. I don't though think Sir Nigel's version could get much of a fire going at that height so might need the help of dragons.

With Minories, I'd reckon to extend the loco spur to form a departures only bay platform which would still be a good place for the station pilot to lurk. You can still see evidence of a separate arrivals and departure platform at Paddington where the waiting and refreshment rooms, ticket office and toilets were (and to an extent still are) alongside platform 1, used for the most important expresses, while the wide arrivals platform between 8 and 9 has no facilities for passengers but a whole circulation scheme for taxis to enter, pick up arriving passengers and leave.

Yes I do. It's Geoff Ashdown's own drawing rather so I think it's OK to post it. Can you remember anything of his explanation? I still suspect the sheer bu**eration of building a reliable double slip was the real reason as also for the interlaced points in the goods yard. I think this 'legend' is similar to the one Tom Cunnington came up with for his Minories (GN) also in EM though that was a pure Minories. To see how platform 2 was used, this movements sheet that I captured at ExpoEM in 2014 may help. Geoff Ashdown isn't the only modeller to have used separate lines at different levels. Roy Emery did it with a greater vertical separation with Fenchurch Cutting. With Tower Pier, the idea is that Minories Junction is the next box where the singled branch to St. Katherine's Dock bifurcates. The dock branch swings off to the left just before the overbridge (and is actually hidden under the road) but the cramped nature of the docks necessitated a two road shunting yard running alongside the station platforms being shoehorned in to the cramped station area to sort out wagons going to and coming from the dock (which in reality had no wharf side tracks) . Given Tower Pier station's location between Minories and Vine Street facing onto Tower Hill, the docks branch is actually in the correct orientation. One of my favorite vignettes on Tower Pier is the dummy District and Circle lines passing underneath the station throat with an Undeground train that never actually moves.

Apart from discussing his EM Tower Pier layout with him at various shows, I didn't know Geoff Ashdown personally though others on RMWEB may have known him better. However, those conversations and the layout itself were enough to form an opinion of a very fine modeller who was also generous in sharing his knowledge and experience. Geoff did invite me to come to one of his regular operating sessions near Southend but circumstances meant that I never was able to take him up on that. I only found out about his death, on 24th March 2023, while trying to find out more about Tower Pier and, as is so often the case, discovered far more about him. As Major Geoff Ashdown he was an officer in the Salvation Army associated with the Southend Citadel, where he had been the "commanding officer" and the Hadleigh Citadel from which he retired in 2017. I think he also worked professionally as a surveyor in the Churchs property department. In his spare time he was also a keen motorcyclist and was a member of the EM Gauge Society. His obituary describes him as "a remarkable individual who touched the lives of many. with a legacy of kindness, understanding, and faith. He was a wise counselor and a great family man. His caring ministry touched countless lives, offering help and blessings to those in need. Geoff’s warm presence, his listening ear, and his ability to make people laugh will be remembered fondly." Geoff Ashdown's layout, Tower Pier, was obviously inspired by Cyril Freezer's Minories, though the track plan was somewhat different and he added a separate set of goods sidings. It depicted the terminus in 1955 of the imaginary Metropolitan Widened Lines Extension Railway. Tower Pier was the endpoint of the railway running from Moorgate down to the Thames, just north of the Tower of London with a goods branch to St. Catherine's dock . The layout was fully signalled and operated in strict accordance with the rules. Geoff told me that the layout, with the station slightly hidden between retaining walls, had been built as a home layout. Though portable, he had never intended it for exhibition. It was though exhibited at least eleven times and always drew large crowds. What was remarkable about it was that the entire layout, including a metre long cassette based fiddle yard, was only three metres by fifty centimetres (10ft x 20 inches) but, with clever use of scenic breaks and a short overall roof, you never realised that the longest train was a tank loco with a single "quad-art" set.

Where is it cached by Google ? (I hope nobody is nicking my photos) This is the complete image I cropped it from which I took at Watford Finescale in 2012. I saw Geoff Ashdown's Tower Pier several times including at ExpoEM and at one of the Stoke Mandeville exhibitions. I hope someone has taken it on following his death last year as it's a wonderful layout and amazing for just three metres in total length including the cassette fiddle yard. It's in EM but I did have a crack at reproducing the plan in the same dimensions with Streamline mediums. but note that the pointwork in the goods sidings I've represented with a double slip is actually two interlaced points as shown in the SBD I think the interlaced points are clear in this photo - taken in 2014 ( I think at Stoke Mandeville) which shows all the pointwork apart from the releasing crossover. The separate goods yard aside, it's not quite operationally identical to Minories as the single slip doesn't enable up (inbound) trains to access platform 2. I don't know if this was deliberately to make it a bit more challengint to operate or jsut because a double slip was too hard to build reliable in the space available. The overall steam-era Widened Lines atmosphere aside (The mythical Tower Pier was supposed to be an extension of them) , two things I particularly liked about Tower Pier were the trick of having the two sidings representing St. Catherine's Dock hidden under a hinged roadway and, for DC, making the whole layout live on one controller but installing "brakes" (i.e switched dead sections) everywhere a loco could legitimately be stopped. As shown in the diagram below. If anyone's interested I'll happily post a few more of my images of Tower Pier

You mean that model railway time is relative- (as of course is time in the full size world though the differences are far too small to notice unless you're running a GPS system. On the Underground, time is really distance so, when the indicator says the next train is three minutes away, it's really telling you where it is not when it is. We can of course apply that principle to our railways so, when the 10.25 train arrives then the time is 10.25 (I can think of a few TOCs who'd probably like that arrangement) It's quite interesting to look at model railways before the war where their rolling stock was often very crude by our standards and would certainly be seen as toys now but they were attempting to model the actual operation of the railway far more authentically than most fine scale layouts would today with sometimes fully interlocked signalling. This is a bit like asking whether my Meccano Set was a toy (I played with it so it was) or an engineering modelling system (I designed and built all sorts of gearboxes with it and Sir Francis Chichester used it to figure out the mechanics of the self steering gear he sued for long solo voyages, so it was that too) We tend to use the term "train set" to mean a setup of model trains that bears no real relationship to the prototype beyond the rolling stock itself. A "train-set" is though simply a way of providing the basic elements needed to run model trains in a single boxed purchase. That can be used just to run trains round and round on the table but it can equally be a convenient and affordable way to get started with a model railway. I think the truth is that, as with photography and the stage, it's not what's being used to pursue the activity that matters (I known an award winning photographer who only uses an iPhone) but rather the attitude of the person carrying out the activity and there's never going to be a defined boundary between them. Between the school nativity play and the Royal Shakespeare Company there's a ginormous difference but that difference is made up of a series of small steps none of which constitutes a definable boundary.

I've just zoomed in on it and the car IS right hand drive with the Reg plate the right way round as is the Low Bridge Sign so it's only the BR logo that is wrong. I'm guessing that it's been painted up to conceal its current ownership but the picutre was sharp enough to enable the loco's number to be made out. The disjunction in StreetView is odd unless the camera was too high to go under the bridge. There's no indication that the streets around lower West End are residents only if accessed from Central Road via the low bridge- though the StreeView vehice obviously didn't go down them (local hostility to it ?) but the access from Harbour Way is residents only - presumably to stop it from being a rat run?

And how many ever do? I've recently acquired some very nice all steel coaches for a layout set in about 1960. They're marked for 1st, 2nd and 3rd classes but third class was abolished in June 1956 so of course I'm going to re-letter them (maybe, one day, when I get around to !)

Curious. I've been through the 25 inch maps in the NLS and there's no sign of it but they only go up to 1930. Smaller scale maps go to about 1960 and, though I wouldn't expect them to show the railway, there is no sign of any development (like a yacht club or boatyard) before the present houses were built. The rails are embedded in a roadway so I'd hazard a guess that, unless it was something left over from the war, it was probably for launching smallish boats at high tide with a winch and cradle. I've detected the rails on Google Earth and where they are is roughly where a sand pit is marked just inland in the 1886 25 inch map but it had gone by the 1906 map and, with nothing else marked there ,I doubt if it was associated with any railway. UPDATE I found this note in the local weekly paper's website. "In the late 1920’s stone and rock arriving by rail for building the South Esplanade was transferred into narrow gauge trucks and pushed on rail lines laid down onto the beach and sand dunes." https://www.burnhamandhighbridgeweeklynews.co.uk/news/16178030.looking-back-50-facts-burnham-on-sea-railway/ There is no sign of this in the OS maps from that period so the track must have been very temporary but this could be vestige of that.

A few years ago I was at IBC (the International Broadcasting Convention- a giant toy show for the television and radio industry - at the RAI exhibition halls in Amsterdam a few years ago, and staying in a hotel in the city, They'd laid on a vintage tram to provide a special service to RAI from the city centre and it was good fun to travel on it.

You've not been to Boston (Mass.) then where the MBTA subway lines are named by their colours on the map, MBTA map Red, blue, Orange, Silver, and Green. I don't know what it's like now but I spent a summer there in the 1970s and it was like a museum of urban transport with almost very colour an example of a different technology. The Blue Line was a typical fairly modern metro with sections above and below ground, The red (though actually built later than the bluie) had rather older metro type trains though it includes a surface "interurban" type line with PCC streetcars , the Orange line was , except in the city centre, a traditional steel viadut "El" which I had the misfortune to stay next to for a week before moving to Brookline where the Green Line was a tramway with a "pre-metro" section in tunnels nearer the centre. The Silver Line is supposedly a "rapid transit bus" running in part in dedicated tunnels but not really enough to be truly rapid. The catch is that passengers would then assume that the line ran from Hammersmith and terminated the first time it reached Edgeware Road without also going round the circle. If you were being logical you might call the former circle line the Hammersmith and Circle, and the Hammersmith and City the Hammersmith and Barking or the Hammersmith and East End line.

Not according to my GP who says that we're now regarded as middle aged until we're 75 so you've still got a way to go. It's interesting how much later we do now (on average) become elderly. I've just been going through a load of MRNs from the the 1950s and 1960s and came upon their tribute in August 1960 to the magazine's former long serving (1936-1957) editor JNM (John) Maskelyne. Looking at the accompanying images I saw someone who definitely looked Edwardian if not Victorian and I assumed he must have been in his late 70s or 80s He was in fact 68 when he died and that was the average male life expectancy in the early 1960s (though a "middle class" white collar worker like JNM might have expected a few more years) . I can remember my own grandparents also looking very elderly in their late 60s. My own father died at the age of 76 but, though he'd suffered ill health for some time, he was never elderly. I believe that when a universal OAP was introduced in 1908 at age 70, few people actually lived long enough to ever receive it.

I started off by using pokey finger control on my small H0 layout but, when I scenicced it, added caboose industry point switches arranged along the front of the layout and connected to the tie bars by short wire in tube. I don't know why but it feels far better operating them from "off-stage"even though only just so. Like an idiot though I failed to allow room in the track plan for dummy standard type J point levers (the sort where swinging a weighted arm pulls the lever over) invariably to be found in small French termini. They do need some space beside the point to operate and act as point indicators as well as levers.

This rather reminds me of Gilbert Thomas' Paddington to Seagood layout which occupied an 18 x 25 ft billiard room in his South Devon House. This was of course in 0 gauge (with spring drive locos) so would be roughly equivalent to 13 x 9 ft in 00 or H0 - the typical size of a bedroom in a 1930s semi (though you'd need wider aisles). I note that, like Minories, "Paddington" has just three platforms and the outer terminus two. Readig his 1947 book "Paddington to Seagood" again, I rather liked his approach to the hobby "...the pleasure of model railroading consists.., not in the slavish imitation of the real thing, but in essential fidelity to actual working conditions...It is from carrying out representative railway operations that the interest springs, and this may be done quite satifactorily on a diminutive scale"

No doubt at all in my mind. I've been going through a lot of MRNs and MRCs from the late 1940s to 1960 recently and found a good number of articles by L E Carroll Apart from the four or five articles in MRN about his Link Section Control system and the out and return from Victoria layout, already listed by Dunnyrail yesterday, there are articles in MRC about his first layout which used HD 3 rail locos converted for stud-contact along with others in both magazines covering a range of topics including, among others, fine scale point construction, transition curves, avoiding buffer-locking and scratchbuilt coach construction. His first layout "as a complete beginner" was quite interesting in concept. It was described in the first of three articles "Horny Dublo and Stud Contact" in March 1952. and, from his articles, would have been built in 1948. There were two termini and a continuous run which was mostly double track but with the two termini fed from a single line section to make for simplet pointwork (it was based on simple turnouts) making operation of trains in both directions "challenging" Unfortunately, there are no photos of the layout I assume that the operating plan was for trains to leave each terminus and then run round the continuous section for several circuits before arriving at the other terminus. The trick of sharing the turntable, which Carroll describes as "heinously unrailwaylike" but highly convenient with the locoshed making a good camouflage, is one I've seen on a few American plans and quite useful given how much space they need. I can't make out any sign of stud contact on his later (but not that much later) Victoria out and back layout first revealed in MRN in May 1955 (Train Exchange) so think he must have gone to two rail fairly quickly after describing how to adopt stud-cotact. Why L E Carroll was not named in the 1979 MRC annual article "South for Moonshine" isn't at all clear. Possibly he felt, wrongly, that having written up the layout for MRN he couldn't then offer an article about it to MRC but Stevens Stratton also described the layout very much in the past tense. I haven't as yet found anything written by Carroll after his New Victoria Line article about the enlarged Victoria Station in MRN in January 1969 and the photo that illustrates South for Moonshine also appears in that article.

As ridiculous as spending a fortune in the 1930s changing all the maps to that weird Beck circuit diagram thing when there were already perfectly good topographical maps that anyone with particularly good eyesight and ten minutes to spare could use. Why so many urban transport undertakings chose to adapt if for their own purposes I cannot imagine: just following fashion I suppose!

Except that it IS one line in the same way as the Central Line is one line and even more than the Northern Line is one line. If I'm looking to find it in a station, I want a sign pointing me to the Elizabeth Line, not a series of signs to the Heathrow, Reading, Abbey Wood and Shenfield lines. This is where I've always found the Paris Metro confusing (and I've used it enough to not need to be confused by it) because signage tends to refer to the end station in each direction somewhere in the nine hundredth arrondissement. It was useful that the Underground adopted the American convention of West, North. South and Eastbound. I was brought up in Oxford where there just 8 or 9 bus routes all of which went through the centre of the City. Nowadays, when I use the local buses in my part of London, I have to look up where any but the three or four that I don't use regularly are actually going- or more particularly what route they're using to get there.

I went to Farringdon on the Elizabeth Line a week or so ago and was very disappointed to find that I was nowhere near Oxfordshire. I think it probably makes sense to brand the services but feel that the chosen names are too reflective of a particular point in history and may well be meaningless in fifty years. I can't help thinking that they could be more geographical and neutral. I do quite like the way that many of the Underground lines reflect their own history as in the Central London Railway, Metropolitan Railway, District Railway etc. The oddity is the Circle Line which is now more like a P than an O

This is obviously a VHS copy (and VHS was introduced until three years after John Allen's death) so I wonder if the actual film (it looks like 16mm) still exists. It would be great for it to be properly telecined to HD video.

If you look at some of the layouts illustrated in Edward Beal's books, they show that a busy all-railway scene with good use of retaining walls etc. can be very effective without going beyond the railway fence. There are plenty of real places (especially around London) that look just like that. Looking at L.E.Carroll's articles, his trains seem never to have been longer than four coaches whether loco hauled or electric sets. That used to be quite common and even the celebrated pre-war Maybank model railway -the first MLT- storage sidings layout- was all railway and based on four coach trains. Carroll got round the problem of duckunders (and the need to store the car in the garage) by the use of "bascules" with counterweighted baseboards that hinged up against the walls of the garage. His main interest seems to have been in correct operation of trains through the various block-sections but, in that steam and pre-Beeching era, the argument was often made that if you just wanted to watch trains going through the countryside it was far easier to simply go out and watch the real thing than to build a model to do so. If you wanted to operate trains, well for that, unless your name was Howey, you did need a model railway.

Did you just build the terminus or the whole Southern Central layout following L.E.Carroll's plan ? I've been delving into the old MRNs and MRC's stored in my garage and I've found a short article by Carroll in MRC in 1951 (on home made corridor connections) and a series of four in MRC (of which I have all but the first) from 1952 on converting Hornby Dublo 3 rail to stud contact. That appears to have been on a layout that preceded Southern Central which I think was a spiralled terminus to terminus representing the WCML. He also had a series of 4 articles in MRN on his "linked section" control system (which is for 2 rail) in 1953/54 followed by an article in June 1958 "Linked Section in Action" describing its application to Southern Central complete with a full schematic diagram of the layout.

I think Bradfield Gloucester Road must have been influenced- perhaps unconsciously- by Ramsgate Sands. apart from being very compact, the main difference being not having the turntable at the end. The main line exiting the platforms and almost immediately going into a tunnel/overbridge and the carriage sidings running further to the right is very characteristic. The one not immediately obvious difference is that Ramsgate did have a very narrow two road goods yard between the up (departures) platform and the cliff behind it though the non goods shed road did have a habit of being used as an extra carriage siding at busy times.

Thanks for the reference. I thought I had that article somewhere and I've now found it. I'm not sure about the pseudonym, though it's possible, as L.E. Carroll had been contributing to MRN since far earlier with a series of four articles, starting in September 1953, on a system of control he'd devised called "Linked Section Control". This had an operator at each station and the signal levers also acting as section switches (I believe Peter Denny adopted something like that but Tony will know) . He mentioned that he'd been casting around for a simpler system of section control while planning a modification of his previous layout. There was an article in the May 1955 MRN "Train Exchage" describing an automated holding loop in the reverse curve to avoid the situation where "the down Brighton Belle disappeared into the tunnel at 3.30 and emerged on the up line five seconds later" - the major weakness of a balloon loop even though it avoided the situation of "hoofing down to Brighton to reverse every train. A schematic of the complete layout first saw the light of MRN day in June 1958 in an article titled "Linked-Section Control in Action" explaining how the system worked, with a couple of photos but no general description of the layout. A complete description appeared three years later in the August 1961 MRN in "Four minutes to Brighton" . However, he said that he'd decided to build the Southern Central as an out and return in 1952. His previous layout having been the point to point in which, for three months, "having despatched trains from Victoria, he had to "hoof it" down to "Brighton" to retrieve them". The reference to three months suggests that the earlier layout wasn't satisfactory and didn't last long. The "Victoria" in that layout had been "Brighton" in the previous and, as the plans posted earlier show, had three platforms and no releasing crossovers (like Minories) two stock sidings and a turntable. The new layout clearly did and in "New Victoria Line "in Jan 1959 the enlarged Victoria station has five platforms , extra sidings including a kickback parcels platform and a proper loco shed alongside the turntable. If there were any other changes to the rest of the layout, he didn't mention them. I've looked for any earlier articles by L.E. Carroll in MRN but so far haven't found any but there are references to the name associated with MRC in 1952 .

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