Back in 2002, once we had settled into the house and the garage was getting sorted out, I started work on a layout for Jimmy’s End. It was inspired by Oakhurst, but had some twists of my own, drawn in pencil and paper, it looked like this:
I soon bought some 4mm plywood and 6mm x 12mm rectangular mouldings to make the baseboards (the mouldings would run along the side frames, and support the tops) and cut some 3″ by 1″ PSE into square blocks, for use at the corners – to one day hold bolts to allow the legs to fold up. The sides were 4″ deep, coming above the baseboard tops, and there were longitudinal and diagonal bracings from 2″ wide strips of the ply. Because the side pieces came up above the baseboard sides, assembly was not easy (PVA can be a very good lubricant before it starts to set!) and I made a major error during construction in that I put the tops on concave instead of convex. Consequently, as the glue was setting, the centres of the boards were being pushed down a little – not enough for me to notice, and I didn’t check once they were set that all was level. Instead, I laid out a few items of stock, including some borrowed, to check that things looked OK, and then pressed on:
A few sundry items of stock allowed me to check the compositions of the layout, L to R we have, coal wagons on the coal road, a Furness SRM (not mine!) in the down/arrival platform, something on the centre road, a train in the up/departure platform, an open in the short siding and a van on the long siding. S scale fits and fills the space nicely, I think.
I got the cork down, and took some photos.
You can see here that the main running lines climbed slightly towards the fiddle yard, and that I had cut a gap in track bed for a small tributary of the River Nene (consistently pronounced “Nen” and variously spelt “Nenne”, “Nenn” and “Nene” in Northampton at the time) which had become a mill stream for my purposes.
At the other end, you can see where I removed cork to allow buildings to sit into the ground, and also had cut a turntable well.
And finally, a close up of the well.
So, what happened? Well… I cut, stained and laid all of the sleepers and point timbers, and even took one of the boards to that year’s summer meeting of the SSMRS, but when I came to start laying the rails, I found that there was a considerable gradient each side of each baseboard joint. At the time, I couldn’t think of a way to amend this fault, so I took the whole bally shooting match to the tip, writing off anywhere from 60-100 hours of work. I think this had more of a negative impact on my modelling activities than I realised, and only recently have I started to get back into the swing of things. For some reason, I seem to have not taken any photos of that stage of proceedings.
Recently, I found the above photos, and thought I would share them with you, in commemoration of a glorious failure which was actually a near-miss…
…however, I rather liked the plan, but struggled to make it fit using Templot, but a few minor tweaks to some items, plus testing ot the Development Version of the software which offers greater flexibility over things like crossing vees for diamond crossings, and I have managed to get it to fit.
An image of the Templot plan, adjusted for small scale output, has been produced:
I warn you now, progress will be slow. Although I have sufficient plywood in stock, I need to produce the sleepers and also have some inside-keyed chairs cast: a friend has produced some lovely patterns for me, and I will one day get around to sending them off to a professional casting company. I will need a few thousand of the little blighters!
One thing I will do is to design the boards differently. The first version was very rectangular, with the side members providing the main structural support. Curved sides require a different approach, and there will be two longitudinal members underneath each board, supporting the track bed but also providing an inverted channel for point rodding and wiring. Perpendicular braces will run from here to the baseboard edges, with triangulation pieces added to prevent twist. Boards will remain short and lightweight, eventual exhibition requiring a supporting framework which will also support the lighting beam. (I prefer a layout height of about 4′, and with 37.5″ boards, folding legs would be difficult to accommodate!)
