Petherick
My copy of his book is probably still in the storage shed, I'll have to dig it out. But one of the points he made is that to be convincing, a model railway should be set in a landscape, not just plonked down on a flat board with a few pimply hills added as an afterthought. Now I only have a space 4' x 1' to play with, which limits just how much Northumbrian countryside I can include, but I still want what little scenery there is to be convincing.
Another issue raised by Barry Norman, Iain Rice and others was the concept of managing sightlines. The idea is to arrange scenery, buildings etc in such a way as to draw the viewer's attention to the middle of the baseboard and away from the edges, where the little world you are trying to create comes to an abrupt halt. So with these principles in mind I set about 'Belstone' with a marker pen and the May 2013 issue of Railway Modeller, which contains a set of 2mm scale drawings for the absolutely typical North British station building and other structures at Scotsgap Junction. The end result being this:
The basic assumption is that Belstone station would have been built on a field on the edge of the town, gently sloping from the 'country' to platform end and from the back of the station to the front. There aren't many flat fields in northern Northumberland, and most of those are next to rivers and prone to flooding. So the North British would have had to make the best of what was available, and use gangs of navvies to clear a level space where the station and track would be.
The station is approached through a shallow cutting: the line then passes under a minor road bridge at the station entrance. I will build this on a slight skew, which will naturally draw the viewer's attention towards the water tower and away from the back corner. An access road then gently descends on an embankment to level out at the back of the station building at around platform level, with a sloping bank behind it rising up to meet the backscene.
The platform end is trickier as there are no structures in the foreground apart from a cattle dock. The best I can think is to have another slight bank along the end, and plant some trees along it. Just one problem: I don't have enough space. So I intend to cheat and extend the baseboard by an inch and a half along the back and across the platform end. I will also have to make a couple of minor alterations to the track plan: shorten the loco servicing road by a couple of inches to make room for the embankment, and slew the goods siding across to allow a bit more space for a loading platform.
Buildings are easy (apart from the minor point that I have never scratch-built a building before). Thanks to Ian Futers, pretty much everything will be Scotsgap. station building (built as a mirror image to put the stationmaster's house at the buffer stop end, otherwise it will not have a garden), signalbox (at the end of the platform ramp as per Scotsgap, but narrowed slightly to fit between the main and bay platform roads), and water tower / coaling stage (again mirrored to put the water hose at the station end, so it will reach locos which arrive at Belstone tender-first). Scotsgap also had an open inspection pit for oiling motion and other minor maintenance, but I am not sure this would have been positioned quite so close to the water tower. If the driver was under the loco while the fireman filled the tender, and the fireman didn't shut off the water in time, the driver would get an early bath...
There will also be some coal staithes, cattle dock (I can't find any photos showing what if any fencing a North British cattle dock would have had) a weighbridge and hut (tucked in near the diamond crossing) and possibly a platelayer's hut somewhere. I thought about putting an engine shed on the loco servicing road (Rothbury had one), but I reckon it would make this corner look a bit too crowded. Come to think of it, Rothbury also had a turntable, and I definitely don't have space for that.
I plan to build the water tower first as this will give me time to experiment with constructional techniques before I get stuck into the bigger buildings. I will probably build all the structures (including platforms) before I start any landscaping, so that I can arrange the landscape contours to meet them, rather than having to cut holes afterwards. This is the first layout I have ever really put any thought into before building it, and I have to say I find it a very satisfying way of doing things. Once you have made the big decisions (who built the railway, where and why) everything else flows naturally from that. Previously I have started with something along the lines of 'I want a double track station with a goods yard, loco shed and branch platform' and then tried to bend the 'back story' into shape to fit the model. If there is really a difference between a train set and a model railway (and most non-modellers would say there isn't) then it is probably right there.
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