South Oak Road » Planning

Working forwards

John Wiffen — Mon, 31 Aug 2009 06:18:40 +0000

With the backscene now in place it was finally time to start adding some of the main structures. As keen as I was to launch straight into the arches and associated cameos situated at the very front of the layout, good sense (and pretty well any article you read on the topic) tells you to add scenic elements to the back of the layout first. This obviously avoids paint being accidentally dribbled across finished foreground scenery or worst still wandering out of the room with a signal attached to your jumper sleeve!

The first element to be added to the background was a large low relief warehouse. This is essentially a standard build of my T026 Factory-warehouse kit with the addition of the excellent Brassmasters windows (packs A and B) that have specifically designed to fit this kit. The fret also includes some very nicely etched wall tie plates and crosses. I found it easier to spray paint these on the fret and then cut out using some fine snips. I then glued them to Scalescenes free grimy glazing sheet printed on to OHP film. I wasn’t 100% happy with how the painted etches adhered to the card back of the warehouse so decided to apply strips of cloth tape as well.

I also created simple downpipes using 1.6 mm Evergreen rod (No. 222) with fine strips of masking tape wrapped around the rod every 24mm to represent joints and wall brackets made from Evergreen 1mm strip (No.122). Spray painted flat black and with the addition of a bit of subtle rust staining (Tamiya’s weathering master pack C) they were then carefully attached to the side of the warehouse buttresses. The whole structure was then glued into position directly over the backdrop.

Background

John Wiffen — Fri, 20 Jul 2007 03:27:33 +0000

My passion for railways was partly inherited from my father who worked as a blacksmith for many years at both Ashford and Eastleigh railway works and my grandfather who worked as a guard on the Southern Railway and on into the Blue diesel era. Despite the influence of my father’s large Southern inspired steam era layout and spending many enjoyable weekends volunteering on the Mid Hants Watercress line, growing up in the Seventies and early Eighties in the UK means the BR corporate blue era is etched into my imagination. I have many fond memories of travelling and trainspotting in and around London and southern England during this period. My aim is to distil just a tiny slice of this wonderfully grimy and run down BR blue era that I remember from my childhood.

A fictitious station, just west of Kentish Town station, South Oak Road is situated somewhere in this area of North West London where numerous lines duck in and out of cuttings, tunnels and over viaducts. The layout focuses on two outer platforms of a slightly larger station complex that is also fed by the nearby Post Office mail and parcel distribution centre.

Google Maps image of the approximate location

“Where’s all the scenery?”

John Wiffen — Sun, 15 Jul 2007 22:04:11 +0000

I’m not sure how many layouts I’ve started over the years but I suspect this may well be my seventh serious attempt at getting a layout beyond the ‘Plywood Central’ stage. For my increasingly skeptical wife and friends I’m sure they have all merged into a single project ‘that looks the same as the last time we were over’. Given that scenery and architecture are the aspects of the hobby that really interest me it does seem odd that I’ve never got to that stage.

The last layout to bite the dust was an ambitious double track oval. Aware that the writing was on the wall for the current railway room with the pending arrival of our first son I began the familiar process of demolishing yet another layout. Afterwards I indulged in a bit of art therapy with some guidance from my friend, artist Sam Creyton, aware that this may well have been my last layout for quite sometime.

An assemblage formed from various fragments
of my previous layouts and plans.

A starting point

John Wiffen — Sun, 15 Jul 2007 09:51:04 +0000

After the dust had settled from the birth of our son, it wasn’t long before I started daydreaming about a new modelling project. The new railway room was and is literally “the smallest room in the house”. Having removed the old ‘fixtures’ (mainly plumbing) I was left with a rather challenging 1550×1250mm (5ftx4ft) space.

The new railway “room”.

With a considerable investment in OO rolling stock I resisted the temptation to switch to N gauge and started exploring options for a small shelf layout. A whole world of potential opened up for me when I came across two fantastic websites. Carl Arendt’s Micro layout design website and Adrian Wymann’s Shunting puzzles website.

Both website’s highlight the huge operational and scenic potential that can be achieved in an extremely small space! After spending many enjoyable hours browsing the many track plans and operational options available on on these sites I settled on a layout based on Carl Arendt’s Smithfield Street Yard.

Essentially a distilled version of the popular Timesaver style shunting puzzle, the traverser, partially concealed beneath the terraced houses, doubles as a very useful run around loop. Despite its small size, with the aid of simple shunting puzzle style rules, it delivers plenty of operational capacity. This was confirmed over several enjoyable evenings, when I constructed a 1:10 scale card version of the track plan with similarly scaled representations of my locos and rolling stock.

View the track plan here.