A sense of place

Sunday afternoon, and having mowed the lawn and pulled up a few random nettles to keep my landlord happy I settled down to some more useful activity.  First job was to make the trackplan alterations mentioned previously - lift and relay the bay platform and loco servicing roads, and slew the goods siding towards the centre of the baseboard to make more room for a goods platform.  All nice and easy.  I haven't reinstated the wiring yet as I am still minded to redo the whole lot while I have the chance.  It will be a lot more difficult once I start putting scenery in place.

Having done which I thought I would have a crack at constructing the first of Belstone's (very few) buildings. If you are looking to recreate the look and feel of a particular area, buildings are important.  Every pre-grouping railway company had its own distinct architectural style.  A good model railway should allow you to take an educated guess at the region it represents, without a single locomotive or item of rolling stock being visible.  And of all the various railway-related structures, probably the most distinctive are signalboxes.

Granted, some companies used off-the-shelf products by companies like Saxby & Farmer or The Railway Signal Company.  But most of them used boxes to their own design, and there was a lot of variety.  One of the best-known was the wooden framed box designed by the Midland Railway.  An early example of modular construction, it could be adapted to suit anything from a small branch line to a major junction simply by increasing the number of window bays.  The design was immortalised thanks to Airfix, who produced a kit in the 1960s for a typical mid-sized Midland box (actually based on Oakham) which must have sold in hundreds of thousands.

Likewise the North British had its own way of doing things. Their boxes were square, solid things with fewer windows than most other companies, and instantly recognisable.  So there was no way I was going to get away with a 'generic' plastic kit-built signalbox for Belstone.  I dug around in the scrapbox, found a pile of Plastikard sheets of various kinds (including embossed stone, slate and brick) and set to work with a Swann-Morton scalpel and some glue, as well as the Ian Futers drawings for Scotsgap signalbox.

After about four hours and a slightly burnt dinner, I now have something which is far from finished, has a lot of rough edges to tidy up, but is still unmistakeably a North British signalbox.  Here it is with one of my unfinished projects from years ago, a resin bodied Class 26 diesel on a Farish chassis, now rendered completely pointless by the Dapol model and so unlikely ever to be completed.

And here is an overall view of the layout showing the realignment work, as compared with version 1.0:

I am still not completely happy with the track plan.  In real life I don't think the loco servicing road would have been accessed via a headshunt off the bay platform.  More likely, given the available space it would have been through a facing crossover interlaced with the access points to the bay platform.  Oddly, Peco have not so far included this particular track formation in their Code 55 range.  But I think the revised arrangement looks better and more railway-like than the original, so I will try to leave it alone now.

Coming next - having managed to build most of a signalbox I will tackle the station buildings (same constructional techniques, just bigger).  I also need to decide whether to build the road overbridge from scratch or just use the Peco one.  Road bridges are a lot less distinctive than signalboxes, and if there is anything unusual or special about North British bridges I cannot see it.