I have had a lifelong interest in the history of the Great Western Railway, as a boy I lived a half a mile away from Paddington Station and spent many happy hours train spotting at the HQ of the GWR.Building models of all forms of transport has been a large part of my leisure over the years. Visiting one of the model engineering exhibitions some years ago I watched the G1MRA demonstration layout and was enthralled by the size of G1 models. I had made attempts at building layouts in the smaller scales 4mm and 7mm but without much success. Most model railways are viewed from above thus you don’t feel part of the railway. Pendon Museum has its layout at just below eye height giving a more engaged feel, but to do a layout of that size in G1 would require a large building, I needed to design a layout that would fit my workshop! I am fortunate to have a large workshop around 30ft long I thought if I rearranged the contents I could build a branch line layout 3ft x 30ft along one wall.
The next problem was stock I prefer the earlier pre-grouping period of the GWR but there are few models that represent that period available from the trade, so if I were to attempt this goal I would have to scratch build everything, a daunting task!
As I get most pleasure from building models rather than running them that did not put me off. To aid making all the models I bought a CNC milling machine and taught myself CAD and CAM to operate the mill.
Croft is a typical GWR branch line consisting of a station building, goods shed, cattle dock, yard with crane, and signal box. As I wanted the feel of reality I needed a back scene, an old pal had a large format digital printing machine, and persuading him with a few pints he suggested if I shot the images he would print several long prints.
A lot of research went into the build, finding examples of various buildings, collecting photographs, making drawings, experimenting with dummy shapes to find the best positions within the available space.
The station building is a standard William Clark design, brick with stone quoins and openings, made in styrene with details cut on the mill as with the fencing. Posters and enamel signs are reduced images found on the web, the bicycle, sack and four-wheel barrow are by Neil Butcher.
The goods shed is a timber frame with stained card external planking and brick paper base. The yard and water crane are made of brass components cut on the mill and soldered together.
The signal box is again made of styrene and brick paper, track and point components are by Cliff Barker. Ballast in stations and yards tends to be ash, to get a convincing substitute proved a problem, I found wet sand and black emulsion well mixed and left to dry gave a mid-grey fine ash. The bridge is inspired by the Victoria Bridge on the Seven Valley Railway and made of styrene, the abutments are MDF covered in stone paper.
To build the locos took a lot of time as each part had to be drawn in CAD and then cut on the mill, to get realistic rivets I found drilling half the thickness of the brass located the punch and thinner brass gave a sharp rivet head.
Mike
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