My MODEL RAILWAY Pages
MARLBOROUGH
The two stations belonged to two entirely separate companies, the Midland & SouthWestern Junction Railway and the Great Western Railway . The stations were almost at right angles to each other and separated only by a road. The running lines actually paralleled each other for a short distance at both the Marlborough and Savernake ends of the tunnel, with separations of only a few yards. To see a potted railway history of the area, with maps, click here.
I began by building the Great Western station, followed by the parallel lines of the MSWJR running along the back of the GW. The layout has been exhibited a number of times in this condition, and also featured in Model Railway Journal, issue No 81.
 |
LAYOUT PHOTO ALBUMS Click any of the links below, to go to the appropriate photo album. |
AN OCCASIONAL DIARY OF PROGRESS MADE
I finally linked the two halves of the layout and now have through running, right round the MSWJ main line - at least, I would have if the house was big enough, but thats a different story!
27th Nov 1999
For regular visitors to this page, who may have wondered; Yes, I am still making progress, albeit slowly for the past few months due to pressure of work, and there has been nothing worth additonal photgraphs, I'm afraid. The only things of any note are that the glaring polystyrene 'snow' is now a reasonable brownish colour and the platforms have acquired a surface. However, my plan now is to get the fiddle yards and legs etc, completed over Christmas 1999 and then, with the heavy civil engineering finally out of the way, I can get on with the really enjoyable stuff (to me) of the scenery and the small details which breathe life into the layout.
Oh, by the way, the layout has just grown by about 2'6" - Well, I didn't think it was big enough before! Seriously, I've bitten a bullet which has been gnawing away at me for a long time and finally decided to extend the visible MSWJ running lines along the front of the GW fiddle yard, so that the MSWJ fiddle yard is end-on to the GW one. This will achieve two things, the most important one is that it has always bothered me that a double FY, one in front of the other, would be an operating nightmare. The knock-on advantage is that I can now include the cutting down to Marlborough Tunnel, on the new section!
27th Dec '99
I wrote those previous two paragraphs exactly a month ago today,and after spending the entire Christmas holiday working at it, I now have both of the 'Savernake end' Fiddle Yards completed, apart from a coat of varnish. My original intention was to build both of the MSWJR fiddle yards at the same time, but a slight change of plan means that instead, I worked on the cutting and Marlborough Tunnel mouth.
21st July 2000
A couple of link URL's needed updating so I'm taking this opportunity to add a few words about the latest progress. The corner section is now has virtually complete basic scenic cover. Only the gardens of the semi-detached houses are still "bare earth". The houses themselves are half built and the gardens will follow as soon as the houses are ready to 'plant'. Hopefully once that is out of the way, I might find the time to do some photography and put them on here.
6th Aug 2000
After a concentrated burst of activity and some fairly exhaustive ( exhausting?) testing, I'm reasonably confident that the layout will make it to Scaleforum in 6 weeks time, looking and behaving respectably. For the latest series of quick photo's, click the link above and don't worry about leaning lamposts, etc, most of that stuff is still loose and will be corrected!
29th September 2000
Well, last weekend was Scaleforum 2000 and we made it! I had a week off work prior to the exhibition and worked from about 6-30am until about 10 or 11pm, most days. The very first time the whole layout went together was at Leatherhead on the Friday evening, and the first time any of the operators saw actually saw the layout was at the show on the Saturday morning! I do not recommend either of those practices to other budding exhibitors, it is not good for either the blood pressure or mental health, but circumstances dictated! Anyway, by some minor miracle, more or less everything worked as it was intended and the running, whilst not as good as I would have liked, was nowhere near as bad as it could have been, so overall, I was not unhappy at the weekend.
My thanks go to all who came and helped operate, and also to those visitors who said nice things about it!
To see an album of photo's taken at the show click here
23rd/24March 2002
A very pleasant weekend at Wakefield, and we almost won the trophy, so I guess others must appreciate the hard work - thank you. The backscene looks quite reasonable (I'm no artist!) and certainly helps the photography quite amazingly - compare the similar shots in the Scaleforum and Scalefour North albums
Please e-mail me to obtain full details.
|
|
|
I do hope that you have enjoyed your visit here, comments on this site or the layout, or additional information on the prototype, are always welcome. So please, would you take a few seconds more, to fill in the guest book:
Sign
My Guestbook
View
My Guestbook
since 1st March 2000
top of page
Back to main
index page