Time, cost, space

As you will have hopefully read in the previous pages, my ideas and railway 'story' centre on the village of Helmdon in south Northamptonshire. Now I need to work out how I go about modelling it.

As with any project, particularly in a field where one has limited experience, it is important to begin on something small, manageable and above all else, achievable. Beyond pinning an oval of OO track to a 4'x3' piece of chipboard many years ago, I've never built a layout before. My interest in the Banbury branch (this line does not run through Helmdon!) lead me to purchase an old copy of Railway Modeller from 1964, containing station plans for the branch. There's an item in that magazine about the time it takes to make a layout.

Sobering thoughts. As I work full time, realistically, I've just a few hours a week to dedicate to building my model.

But I'm in no particular rush to get my ultimate aim finished. I'm not a railway fanatic, operations are not really my thing. The pleasure for me is in the planning and building, once it is finished, I'm not sure what I'll do. I do, however, want to have a layout to 'play' with soon. Grand ideas about filling my 20+ feet long loft space with a massive complicated multilevel layout should be forced way out of my mind at this phase. My guess is the boarding up will take a couple of years. There is a distinct advantage to that of course - cost. The slower one builds, the slower one spends!

By chance I have stumbled upon a cracking website Micro/Small Layouts For Model Railroads. Full of small, and even tiny layouts, it's inspired me to start small. Further, while trawling WH Smith for a railway mag (anything that looked interesting) I found the October 07 issue of Hornby magazine featuring the final episode of building a small circular layout with a siding. The images looked convincing and the plan could easily be adapted to produce a roundy roundy version of Helmdon's N&BJR station, simply by joining the two ends of the station back to each other.

Helmdon LMS station as a looped layout.

Plenty of LMS open wagons, cattle vans, a Fowler 0-6-0 4F and a token Jinty are already in my collection, ideal for such a small layout. Though I don't think Jinties ever ran on that line, 4F's certainly did.

Alas, though simple, the loop idea really serves no purpose and would prove rather difficult to store. I have, for many years, admired the simplicity of 'shelf' layouts such as Freezer's Minories. I've spent much time reading about the rail lines in my area, and thinking on how they'd interact with my Helmdon Junction ideas. The terminus at Banbury Merton Street holds some considerable personal intrest for me, not least because when our family first moved to this area in the 70's the last remaining evidence of this station was the concrete goods shed my father used for storage of the animal feeds he supplied. It was many years before I realised the significance of the Banbury BRS yard that it had by then become. Now that I wish to spend time looking at the site, it lies under a new housing estate, along with the largest cattle market in Europe which was once served so well by the Merton Street station.

So right now, on the eve of 2008, my plan is to build a representation of Merton Street, developed from a Minories plan. I reitterate that it is to be a representation of Banbury Merton Street, not a replica, not a scale model.

CONTENT