Blog- Building Buckden - Brampton Road Embankment

RSS Fetcher · December 20, 2014

Cambridgeshire, as many who know it as well as I will not need telling, is flat. Very flat. So it is that I wasn't too concerned with using bowling green flat boards as a starting point for Buckden. The layout did however need some topography at one end, for the embankment at the Kettering end where Brampton Road crosses the line. The embankment is long gone and was well before I was born, but it slopes gently towards the north and Buckden village to meet the gently raising ground, and on the Brampton side slopes down to meet the rather flatter ground. An inspection of the 1890 and 1920 OS surveys suggest that the grade on the Buckden side was only 0.02 degrees (or 1 in 49ish) so over the short length which would be on the layout the drop would be imperceivable, so I ignored it and kept the approach level. The bridge was skewed over the line, which I modelled (although because of the way the layout was previously housed, I skewed it the opposite way).

The bridge is also long gone, and I've only ever seen it at a distance in one photo in E.H. Sawford's "Cambridge Kettering Line Steam" (Becknell Books, 1981), not least as most photos of Buckden station are taken FROM the bridge. From that photo it looks to be pretty similar to the one at Kimbolton which is more clearly photographed, and I used that, plus the extant rail bridge towards Grafham to get the general idea, and used the Wills SS64 abutment kit.

For the embankment I used a framework of polystyrene (both from Woodland scenics and the packaging from my Futon):

After remembering (through trial and error) that every glue in my box dissolves expanded polystryene apart from PVA, I used that to attach the framework to the boards, along with some panel pins pushed through to hold everything together.

I then progressively used plaster bandage to build up the contours.

I'm very pleased with the results, and the general view now looks as follows, with the station building now primed grey, and 46403 standing with a short goods:

Marcus.

Attached thumbnail(s)