First contact with Garden Railways

[90733]

Well erm I dunno where it all started.Always love railways and used to read articles by Tag and Peter in Railway Modeller but thought the cost was stupidly mad.
Suppose my first proper touch with 16mm scale was elesecar last year where me and me dad got i loco and 4 wagons.
Now i have 7 locos 13 wagons and some coaches wiating to be built

[hussra]

My introduction to 16mm was at an exhibition in the old Belfast Transport Museum at Witham Street - now that was an atmospheric venue. A chap from Bangor whose name I now forget had a layout there, I remember he had a Merlin Sierra Leone Hunslet and a Pooter and quite a bit of other stuff that I now forget; he bravely offered me a drive of the Pooter. Fun times.

[MuzTrem]

Seeing an advert for the then-new Roundhouse Katie in a 1998 issue of Railway Modeller. I hadn't realised it was possible to build real steam engines so small! My brother sent off for a catalogue and I decided I wanted an engine; my parents said "no way will we pay for it" so I decided to save up. And for the next three years I religiously kept back £1 of my pocket money (which was only £1.50 a week at the time, so it was quite significant!), plus Christmas and Birthday money...eventually Mum and Dad realised I was serious and gave in!

The whole story of how the MVR then came into being is at http://mvr.webs.com/routehistory.htm - but I don't blame you if you can't be bothered with it, it is a little long!

[DolwyddelanLightRail]

The whole story of how the MVR then came into being is at http://mvr.webs.com/routehistory.htm - but I don't blame you if you can't be bothered with it, it is a little long!

And i thought MY history was long!

One thing that has bothered me though, is the prices of everything, is it that everything is just sooooo expensive to build, or the fact that it's a niche market and their making the most of it? cause originally that was a BIG offputter for me, and it still is slight

(Sorry if i've gone horribly off-topic!)

[MDLR]

And I thought MY history was long!

My history can be found at: http://myweb.tiscali.co.uk/mdltrly/history.html which is slightly different (and I've just noticed, rather out of date!)

[kes]

Comptons story as written by Dad...

http://web.me.com/djescher/Comptondown/story.html

[Endless, Nameless]

Tag's articles in Railway Modeller probably 10 or more years ago now- but it was Mark Found's programme and finding the G Scale Mad forum that actually got me started. I kind of came to it from the larger scales though!

[TommyDodd]

I remember my first encounter with garden railways well, I can pinpoint it to the day- a wet wednesday afternoon in September 1983. In fact it was so wet that games (posh for PE- I was at school then) had been cancelled and we were left to our own devices. I wandered into the library to find the head librarian cleaning and tidying the stores. They had a subscription to Railway Modeller then, and kept all the old ones for a while but a load were being chucked out. I asked if I could have a few and ended up with as many as I could carry.
I was mainly into modern image 00 then (yes, we called BR blue diesels and 1st gen DMUs "modern"- how quaint) but had seen narrow gauge railways thanks to a family holiday in Wales- my fault, as I'd wanted to see the Tallyllyn ever since seeing a picture in one of the Skarloey books- and was surprised and delighted to find that you could actually model them, so 009 articles were devoured.
But that was nothing, nothing compared to the discovery I made in the August '82 issue. There was a guy running a narrow gauge line in his GARDEN, using REAL STEAM! How was that even possible? The guy was Robin Lumley and his line was "The Princetown Branch", an imagined tourist re-opening of the lamented GWR line across Dartmoor closed in 1956. He'd done it using a combination of Bonds' coarse ) gauge track, scratchbuilt freelance stock on BigBig bogies, and 3 Mamod locos (about all that was available then, if you couldn't afford Archangel).
It had some interesting foibles. The line was operated in 100% real time to the last BR timetable with the trains travelling the correct scale distances at the correct scale speed. He did this by leaving his bottom terminus and going out onto the circuit, doing X number of laps then diving into a through station on a loop, then returning to the circuit and doing enough laps to have covered the scale distance to Princetown. Another oddity, unique AFAIK, was his attempt to recreate the atmosphere of the prototype by building his model stations and other locations using material salvaged from the real station sites so Dousland station, for example, was made of Dousland station.
I've seen many garden railway articles since then, and despite the massive improvements in the art none have quite recaptured the original WOW factor of Princetown. I think it created such an impression because the builder didn't approach it as a model railway at all but treated it as a real railway albeit a very small one, and ran it as such. That's what I really wanted then, and what I still want- and am trying to create- today.

[made-in-england]

Mark Founds garden railway series on Discovery Home and Lesuire.. scoured the internet looking at LGB,.... didnt like the look and too many sovs so ploughed on playing with mamods and big traction engines till a couple of years ago I bought a mamod railway set from PPS.. then discovered IP etc etc etc

[bessytractor]

an enormous OO gauge line in the garden of one of my grandparents neighbours. Me and dad were left to operate it, and ended up crashing a German ICE and splitting a train mid section! I was only about 8 so wasn't quite past the Hornby Dublo on the floor stage!

[MDLR]

     But that was nothing, nothing compared to the discovery I made in the August '82 issue. There was a guy running a narrow gauge line in his GARDEN, using REAL STEAM! How was that even possible? The guy was Robin Lumley and his line was "The Princetown Branch", an imagined tourist re-opening of the lamented GWR line across Dartmoor closed in 1956. He'd done it  using a combination of Bonds' coarse ) gauge track, scratchbuilt freelance stock on BigBig bogies, and 3 Mamod locos (about all that was available then, if you couldn't afford  Archangel).

I remember that one - the Diesel locos and coaches were in BR Blue, as this was a Real Railway..............

[GardenRail]

I
     But that was nothing, nothing compared to the discovery I made in the August '82 issue. There was a guy running a narrow gauge line in his GARDEN, using REAL STEAM! How was that even possible? The guy was Robin Lumley and his line was "The Princetown Branch", an imagined tourist re-opening of the lamented GWR line across Dartmoor closed in 1956. He'd done it  using a combination of Bonds' coarse ) gauge track, scratchbuilt freelance stock on BigBig bogies, and 3 Mamod locos (about all that was available then, if you couldn't afford  Archangel).
      It had some interesting foibles. The line was operated in 100% real time to the last BR timetable with the trains travelling the correct scale distances at the correct scale speed. He did this by leaving his bottom terminus and going out onto the circuit, doing X number of laps then diving into a through station on a loop, then returning to the circuit and doing enough laps to have covered the scale distance to Princetown. Another oddity, unique AFAIK, was his attempt to recreate the atmosphere of the prototype by building his model stations and other locations using material salvaged from the real station sites so Dousland station, for example, was made of Dousland station.

Yes indeed I remember this one very well. It was steam that brought me into the garden a couple of years after this and it was grumpy old Tom Cooper that first introduced me to usable live steam at a model railway show in Plymouth. From there I found the 16mm Association and Tom's Steamlines mag. I then purchased a Merlin Mayflower, which (much modified) is still currently on the roster.

It was the Peter Jones approach to garden railways that made it for me, both in Steamlines and SMT. His articles were always so accessible in the sense that one did not feel one was receiving information from an expert who we could never emulate (which actually, I suppose we were) and, while my own modelling activities are very much different from Peter's, they are based on the holistic principles embodied in Compton Down. So Tom Cooper gave me the push start that I needed, while Peter did much to get the LWR off the ground...

Happy days..

Tag

[TonyW]

Brambleton Model Railway Club (http://www.brambleton.org.uk/) gave me my first introduction to outdoor railways. That was back in the early 1970s and we only did O Guage back then.

I first discovered 16mm scale at the Hampton Loade "Paddock Railway" on the SVR in the late 1980s, and have been hooked ever since.

[Pendo Pilot]

The guy was Robin Lumley and his line was "The Princetown Branch", an imagined tourist re-opening of the lamented GWR line across Dartmoor closed in 1956. .

Wow, I had forgotten all about that, I also saw that & if I recall there was another article on it when all the mamods had died & been replaced with battery loco's...........or has that mingled with time & something else. Either way I remember the (or an ) article on it. I always used to love the August edition of RM just for the few garden railway features it used to have regardless of scale. But the steam ones were always my fav.

[TommyDodd]

Wow, I had forgotten all about that, I also saw that & if I recall there was another article on it when all the mamods had died & been replaced with battery loco's...........or has that mingled with time & something else.

I can't say for certain how many there were, but I do know that I have four. There were a couple in Jan/Feb 1982 IIRC called "Princetown- the line in winter", describing all-battery operation and giving a few practical tips, including making track using cast concrete sleepers for a real modern-image flavour. I think one more appeared in August 85 or thereabouts, after he'd relocated and built a new line (title "Resurgam", meaning "I shall rise again) based on the Tavistock branch but using the same stock. There was even (if you live in the Yorkshire TV region) a 10- minute snippet on a local telly magazine programme which I still have on VHS somewhere...must dig that out.