Exercise Meteor

[Paul821]

For no explicable reason 2022 has not been a good year for my modelling mojo, I have achieved very little in the first seven months, and my attempt to  get inspired via the Revell / Monogram GB is moving a less than a snails pace.

 

So hopefully rescue has come through an unexpected source, as I have recently acquired a Thomas the Tank Engine layout from a friend, as his son is now into X-Box games and they are about to move house.

 

The Thomas engines have been stored but my first project, to fully reuse the layout involves these (sorry for poor photo but it is a small segment of a photo taken on my phone.

 

 

the long term objective is to use the layout as the base for my second world war dated layout which has been a armchair project for over 30 year. So , I started looking at what I could do to the houses and the current result is this;

 

 

For the moment ignore the house on the left.

 

I don't know what the source of the design the Airfix designers had, but trying to envisage an interior for these buildings is impossible, as the internal chimney stacks line up with windows in some places and its hard to work out where a bathroom would be. My thoughts are that they downsized a semi-detached house,

 

From a 140's view point the integral garage had to go, as I cannot find any pictures of similar houses of the 1930's with this feature. Indeed Mrs 821 lived in a very similar building of the 1930's at which point no thought had been given to parking.  So the garage has gone on the righthand house.

 

Yes the heaviness of the widows does offend me but this is a project about rescuing and reusing the buildings,

[pigsty]

I see you also have a downpipe without a gutter round the roof ...

 

The house on the right almost certainly isn't half a semi.  It's two and a half bays, which is common for detached houses and very uncommon for semis.  Having said that, there's a couple of larger semis not far from me - but they meet at the bay window.  Separate bays with a recessed frontage between them is very, very rare.

 

Chimneys obviously shouldn't line up with windows but there's always the option of a canted flue.  My house had fireplaces in front and back and the flues lean over in the roof to meet under the single centreline chimney stack.  One other possibility is that some of the rooms have kinked walls, so the features line up but don't interfere with one another.  Another is fireplaces in odd spots like the corner of the room instead of the middle of the wall.  A good source of information is contemporary house plans, which sometimes show some real oddities.  The best are the sort that were produced as brochures for speculative developments - loads of designs in one source, and some of them resemble what they actually built.

 

Looking at the side of your house, there's more odd stuff going on.  The narrow upper window looks like a stair light - but the stairs would usually be on the opposite side, somewhere behind the front door.  The range of windows below it is also unusual, more normally seen in big set-piece places that would feature in House and Garden; and it implies a full-depth room, which isn't impossible but would still be fairly rare, as it also implies another one above it.  As for bathrooms, I'd venture the most likely spot is at the back on the right, broadly at the top of the stairs.  A lot of houses back then had surprisingly small bathrooms, stacked above surprisingly small kitchens for the plumbing runs, and they're not always immediately obvious.  (I've always thought putting the bathroom above the front door is faintly rude.  Who wants to hear the contents of the lavvy swishing by as you ring the doorbell?)

 

However ... with all those slightly wobbly features, it's possible they weren't trying to produce a genuine layout, just a skin.  That leaves you free to muck about to your heart's content.  Can you, for example, move the chimneys, or are they fixed?

[Circloy]

When these were introduced (circa 1958/1960) neither Trix, Hornby (Dublo) or Tri-ang were producing 'true' scale models there were heavy compromises all round, especially where larger items were concerned. Think coaches/stations.

 

I think these were the same just a series of buildings only ever intended to fill space and give an impression of buildings of their style.

 

Toy building for toy trains.

 

[Mark Harmsworth]

I'm not a railway chap, and I sort of stumbled on this, but what struck me is the similarity between these houses and the Airfix Control Tower - are the house 1:76?   No idea if this helps at all but I replaced the windows in the Control Tower with a p.e. set from Flightpath. Like this:

 

[Paul821]

The title of this has changed partially in response to a request by @arfa1983 in the Salty Sea Dog Chat, where he requested pictures of my work on a WW2 railway layout.

 

Due to various factors over the winter I have been unable to do much work on the layout. The "Thomas" layout shown in the earlier posts is just part of a much larger project, which is a series or linked diorama's, which fit together to form part the entire project. Before Thomas arrived work had started on the first two.

 

So to explain the context - if you use a search engine you will find that the only reference to this on the Internet seems to be my entry regarding this project in the RMWeb forum!  That thread is here: https://www.rmweb.co.uk/topic/161379-by-rail-to-victory-march-1945-exercise-meteor/

 

Unfortunately RMweb has an outage last year and some photo's were lost

 

Basically Exercise Meteor was the cover story for what became Operation Varsity, the successful crossing of the Rhine in March 1945. Units to take part in this were moved to the airfields from which they would take off and were told that they had relocated for an exercise. It was only on the night before the offensive that they were told they were to fly out, as paratroops or on gliders to the Rhine Crossing. Much of the airborne force force used airfields in North East Essex, as these were the closest to the Rhine. So the core of the layout is based on the railways of the area. However I want to represent more of, what was called, Area 1 of the LNER's role in the war so some of the dioramas show other aspects - thus the bombed house, and a forthcoming dockside scene.

 

I will now update both this thread and the RmWeb one are work continues.

[Paul821]

The clean up has been completed and as much work as possible will be reported on under the appropriate thread such as two of the elements within the Salty Sea Dog GB.

 

Four boards make up the current layout;

 

 

 

A Hornby Track mat showing the trains I intend using to demonstrate various aspects of railways during WW2.

 

Local branch line train

Serving the home font, food and coal

Bombs

Fuel for bombers

Ambulance train

Troop transport train

 

In the centre are various military loco's and additional wagons.  I might add a VIP train to the list as various "high ups" visited local lines during the conflict.

 

 

Board 2 is based on the Easton Lodge halt and USAAF storage area

 

 

Board 3 - represents part of a branch line station

 

 

Board 4 has only just been added but will become the dockside scene from the GB

 

 

and you can never have  too few Nissen huts!

 

So now back to sittin' on the dock of the bay!