In another beginning...

[philipy]

Following Peter Butlers "In the Beginning" thread, and mindful of Tom's suggestion:

I'd be happy to post if there is any interest, but back in those days I was into N Gauge and then 4mm, so hardly appropriate for this forum.

Any scale, any gauge

...I'll post a few bits and pieces from my past. Much of it is on my webpages anyway ( see the link under my signature, below).

I'll begin with my first foray into the world of garden railways back in about 1978. This is a fairly unusual garden scale...N Gauge! Needless to say it looks a lot better than it ever ran. The biggest problem being wind blowing the trains off the track

Ngarden1.jpg (329.01 KiB) Viewed 5902 times

Ngarden2.jpg (200.92 KiB) Viewed 5902 times

ngarden3.jpg (305.39 KiB) Viewed 5902 times

I was doing this at the same time as my big N Gauge exhibition layout based on the Worksop - Retford line in the '70's, of which, more next time.

[River Lin]

How can a railway in a garden not be appropriate for a garden railway forum?
It was OO gauge when i was a lad but n gauge when my lad came along. I bought a Graheme Farish track plan sheet. 4x2 i think. Stuck it to a board and bought all of the track and buildings over time to complete the layout. And guess what, i still have it all and my old OO stock.
D.

[tom_tom_go]

N gauge in the garden, it looks great which I did not expect given it's size.

Being of a younger generation to most of you I started out with a Hornby OO gauge HST 125 train set with steel track running DC. I still have the loco set but everything else was sold.

[Peter Butler]

I love it! Ambitious and beautifully presented, that was something different for its day, and probably still would be today?

[markoteal]

Love the final lake shot - n gauge can sit into the environment and make it look much bigger - albeit the wind and a bumble bee can knock the loco off the track

[Soar Valley Light]

Hi Phillip.

I've seen pictures of the odd N gauge garden line before but your line is one of the best I've seen, especially in the way it sits naturally in the landscape. I expect it was quite a ground breaking idea at the time.

I look forward to hearing more about the Worksop - Retford project, an area I know pretty well being a North Notts lad originally. I spent some happy nights in Worksop West chatting with my mate who worked there.

Andrew

[LNR]

No worries about large radius curves then in "N" scale. The start of another great story.
Grant.

[philipy]

Thanks chaps. To be perfectly honest, I got ahead of my experience and abilities ( and finances!) with N in the garden and it only lasted about 12 months before I moved house and it was all lifted.

Well as I said, I was also building a large N Gauge exhibition layout based on Worksop station in the mid-70's, with a representation of the line eastwards towards Retford. When I say large, it was approx 24ft long by 3ft wide. It was essentially two tailchaser loops which had a lengthwise off-centre 'backscene' with the apparently end-to-end running lines at the front, and ladder fiddle yards at the back. The track was Peco, most of the stock was Grafar and locos were a mixure of RTR and kitbuilt, plus a couple of scratchbuilt bodies on commercial chassis. All of the buildings and scenics were scratchbuilt. I had just finished this layout in time for it's first outing to my local clubs exhibition in Retford, but then I changed jobs and moved 170 miles from Worksop to near Maidenhead, a few weeks after. After the move, I did a few exhibitions with 'Worksop' in the Thames Valley area before getting seduced by my new club's ( Marlow & Maidenhead) Finescale OO layout, called Meadows End.

Worksop exhib press.jpg (373.74 KiB) Viewed 5855 times

One of my archive press cuttings which prompted my original comment on Peter's thread.

I would have left this posting at this point, but since Andrew expressed interest in this layout, here are some more random pics of it ( I'm sure I have more but can't find them atm. The West Box is just visible as a small white 'thing' in the distance in the big picture):

Worksop 2.jpg (526.06 KiB) Viewed 5855 times

Worksop pics 1.jpg (509.14 KiB) Viewed 5855 times

Edited to add, Just found a pic of the West Box, for Andrew

west box.jpg (137.75 KiB) Viewed 5852 times

[Peter Butler]

Fascinating collection of pictures and great memories of the early years of your model making. I do hope other members can contribute to this to encourage younger modellers to make a start.

[FWLR]

Great looking layout Phil, don’t think I would have the courage to lay it outside though, I have enough hassle running my N Gauge inside

Though my two young Grandsons are doing an excellent job with their 4x3 N Gauge layout, they both love working on it, the older one George more so, but for 7 years of age he has a lot of knowledge already and they can only progress more now.

All of the family both young and old love my 32mm garden layout though and the 5 youngest Grandkids all love the running of the engines I have...

[philipy]

Peter, Yes something similar was in my mind. I for one would love to see other member's achievements, garden or not.

Anyway, as I said, at that time, MM &D MRC had no N Gauge members so I got involved with their OO layout and in due course, Worksop went the way of all things. I also had 2 small sons who wanted to play with Daddy's trains, but couldn't cope with the smaller size, so again OO was the way to go. Whilst a member of this club I was involved with 3 different OO layouts, plus eventually another N Gauge, before moving on to P4.
At home, not only did my eldest get a railway running round his bedroom, but we also went back into the garden. On the back of the house was a slightly ramshackle lean-to conservatory which held a chest freezer and the vacuum cleaner and not much else. The ideal location for a station, so holes were created at both ends and a simple loop built round the garden fences. Unfortunately the only pictures I have of this are in the background of another subject.

Taplow.jpg (254.43 KiB) Viewed 5806 times

Both of my sons had their birthday on the same day, (not twins, 3 years apart!) and one year it happened to be on a Saturday so we dropped a request to Ed 'Stewpot' Stewart and got them a mention on his Saturday morning radio programme 'Junior Choice' . He played, "The Railroad runs Through The Middle of the House", for them!

[CVLR]

My beginning was N too. Well, I say beginning, it's still ongoing and done in tandem with my 16mm garden railway.....guess I'm banned now then?

[Peter Butler]

Beautiful work, particularly for the small scale which I have never attempted myself. Thanks for joining the thread, I hope we will see many more.

[philipy]

One of the layouts I was involved in at the club was modular. Owned by half a dozen of us, it was quite popular on the exhibition circuit because, with straight sections, corners and terminii, it gave exhibition managers great flexibility. 1982 happened to be the 800th Anniversary of the Maidenhead Town Charter and our annual exhibition was offered the chance to be included in the promotional stuff as long as we were doing something appropriate. A model of Brunel's Thames bridge ( known locally as The Sounding Arches, because of the echo underneath) was suggested and I volunteered. To justify its construction it was designed to fit the parameters of the modular layout so that it could be used as a visible 4 track fiddle yard.
I can't quite remember how it happened but somehow I wangled my way into the archives at Paddington and actually handled the original design drawings for the bridge. Quite an amazing document, a beautifully hand coloured Victorian engineering drawing dating from 1835, covered in pencilled long-hand calculations for the verticals to create the shape of the elliptical arches. Anyway, it occupied our dining room for several months and generated quite a bit of press coverage....

Bridge 1.jpg (600.3 KiB) Viewed 5764 times

bridge 2.jpg (148.97 KiB) Viewed 5764 times

[tom_tom_go]

The HST 125 in the second picture is identical to mine although it never got to run on an amazing layout like that!

[FWLR]

My beginning was N too. Well, I say beginning, it's still ongoing and done in tandem with my 16mm garden railway.....guess I'm banned now then?

I have seen this layout on another forum, it’s brilliant....
I am no longer a member of that forum though...it got too cliquey...and bossy.....

[CVLR]

Cheers Rod, and I don't do cliquey, bossy forums either.

[philipy]

Things moved on and I was looking for a new project. One of our group had been soldiering on, on his own, building a P4 layout of Grafton on the MSWJR. Having got it running, he was short of stock to be able to exhibit it, so I volunteered to build some bits and pieces. One thing lead to another and I ended up with a fair collection of P4 stock. That lead in turn to me building my own P4 layout, based on Marlborough. Its a long, 12 year saga, so I won't bore you all now, but if anyone wants to see details go to http://www.zen116491.zen.co.uk/trains/M ... orough.htm

The picture below is the only one I have showing the whole thing. Being L-shaped and approx 23ftx24ft, it's difficult to get it all in one photo, but this exhibition hall had a gallery.

s4um-30.jpg (70.88 KiB) Viewed 2838 times

After this, various upheavals resulted in a number of years of no modelling at all, but that came to an end when I finally started on a 'proper' garden railway and joined this forum, back in 2012.

[Soar Valley Light]

Phillip,

Thanks for the photos. The model of the station building at Worksop is a very accurate and instantly recognisable piece of work. I love the shot of 'West'. It captures completely the environment around the box, especially it's relationship to the bridge. Did you include the BRSA club too? It brough back one or two memories which I shan't hi-jack your topic with!

I'm afraid, for all my modelling experiences, I've never taken any pictures, so I've nothing to share! I hope a picture in words will do!

My first train set (for my second birthday - the die was already cast at that age!) was a Hornby Dublo goods set, the small one with the R1 tank, two opens and a toad brake. This was 1964 and obviously the last products from Binns Road, apart from a few stock clearance items all childhood additions were Triang-Hornby. Apart from a couple of forays into the garden with some early Lego rails, a folding 6x4 board in my bedroom was sufficient until I was about 15, and old enough to persuade Dad that a layout in the loft would be less in the way! The layouts which followed in the 11 x 11 space up there were varied but never long lived, the building was more fun than the operating and I could never really reproduce the scale models of prototype locations I longed for.

The desire for creating something accurate led me to dabble in Scalefour. I was working on one of those small semi industrial shunting layouts somewhere on the Midland (being very much a Midland man at the time). I'd joined the local Leen Valley Model Railway Club where we were exhibiting an oldhinherited layout, building a better exhibition one to replace it and slowly working on a scale model of Sutton-in-Ashfield Town (GNR). They were a great bunch ofpeople and one of the other lads was also an S4 modeller. He was building a model of Loddiswell on the Kingsbridge branch of the GWR. He talked me into modelling one of the other stations on the branch so we could exhibit them exhibited together. I researched the line and fell in love with Gara Bridge. The boards were build and the line marked out, the only photo I know I took of any of my models was of the rolling stock standing on the marked out formation alongside the partially complete station building.

It was at this point that 12" to the foot scale took over! One of my final model purchases was a Mamod loco and few lengths of track, it wasn't a great success. There was a long pause in modelling extending for the better part of 35 years! My first 12 or so years of volunteering in Heritage railways (preservation when I started!) were on the Midland Railway Trust. during which time I watched the Butterley Garden Railway start from a disused patio in front of the old buffet. I often sat in Butterley box watching the activities and thinking how nice it would be to build something like that! It was a couple of years ago when I remembered the Mamod loco during a winter holiday on the south coast, goodness knows what brought that on (the memory of the loco I mean, not the holiday!) Anyhow, that was the trigger and the rest is recorded in my Charnwood Forest Light Railway topic in the railways an layouts section.

Andrew