New Project

[Paul821]

 

No - I have not entered this into the wrong thread

 

Although Exercise Meteor

 

remains my main project, with the proposed Railways GB having reached the November Bunfight I thought that I would see if I could get a short project through from start to completion before the end of the voting.

 

Over the last decade or so I have build up a collection of OO gauge rolling stock for three projects:

 

A second world war layout  - now Operation Meteor

A military railway -  now aborted and the stock will be up for disposal

The railways I remember - North & East London in the late 1950's - early 1960's - this project

 

Building the Airfix Vintage DH Heron was the catalyst for the layout, but it will be a what-if with a feasible back story. All I am going to reveal in this initial post is that it will be a (so called) shelf layout and with digital control.

[Paul821]

Having just purchased the last components needed for the first stage of this project building should start soon, so a little more of the back story.

 

The factual part of the story is that post war planning for London included a possible major airport east of the city. Obviously until the building of London City Airport this did not occur. This model will assume that a small  airport had been constructed in the Hainault area in the 1930's and underwent major redevelopment in the early 1960's. The layout will  be set during this redevelopment.

 

This post is made on a tablet some initial plans an pictures will appear when I am back on  a laptop.

[Paul821]

Now back on Laptop.

 

Many people have knowledge of the London Underground map, and will be aware that the eastern central line has two elements to it, one is the line out to Epping and the other is a loop line from Woodford to Leyton via Hainault. What is less known is that until 1947 all these lines were part of the Suburban network from Liverpool Street with a junction at Stratford as seen in blue on this map:

 

 

At the time of this map the line from loop from Woodford was closed to passengers for conversion to a underground line, this included a new line through Newbury Park, However there was a goods service served by the line through Ilford. The  green line at Ilford shows where there was another line that formed a triangle. The site of these lines is now under Ilford Depot. The other green line is my imagined branch line  built to the airport in the early 1950's. This would have been served by trains from Liverpool Street. As my build progresses I will bring the story up to the date the layout is set in, which is the early 1960's.

[Paul821]

Apart from the back story, track planning is the usual start for any model railway. In this case the answer was in a much used plan dating from 1957.

 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minories_(model_railway)#:~:text=Minories (model railway) From Wikipedia%2C the free encyclopedia,of Peco 's many collected plans books afterwards.

 

My take on the plan only includes one alteration

 

 

 

In the original the line at the bottom leads to a Parcels Platform but in my take on the design it will become a running line. The backstory of this will appear later. 

 

The station has three platforms and my planned mode of operation will be that a loco hauled train will enter platform three (a shown above). A pilot engine will come out of the top line and then move the coaches to platform 2 (occupied by the DMU). The pilot engine will then return to it's spur and the train loco will come onto the coaches. However before it departs a DMU will enter platform 3 and then depart. At other times a DMU will use platform 2 as shown above.

 

 

 

One issue with the original Minories layout was that a number of isolated sections had to be created and wired to operate the layout. It is only with the adoption of DCC operation that the layout becomes much easier to run. The next stage of this project will be to construct the platforms for the station and start to attach motors to the points. All the components for the layout come from previous projects or my stash.  This accounts for the odd bits of ballast and missing sleepers seen in the pictures.