What makes this layout great?
The club recognised a need and decided to act on it. The result is a lovely little layout which can be transported easily and safely, thanks to the enclosed baseboard, giving the operators peace of mind while on the road.
Pictures: Chris Nevard Artwork: Andrew Macintosh
2 Ray has done a lot of weathering without an airbrush, applying a wash and then rubbing most of it off. He avoids using weathering powder as it tends to come off when handled at exhibitions.
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Throughout our lives, our priorities change, sometimes with primary life goals and sometimes with more minor, less significant changes. The same is true with the desires of model railway clubs. What was once a superb exhibition layout could, in the future, become too large and cumbersome to be transported around the country. This was the case for the Beaconsfield Model Railway Club, whose previous exhibition layout ‘Beaconsbury’ required multiple cars and operators at every event, so in 2018 the club decided something smaller was needed and set about work on three Tim Horn baseboards.
“We wanted an exhibition layout which was small and would depict some industry for operational variety,” explains Ray Lewis, club secretary and member for 52 years. “As the layout needed to fit into one car, it had to be a small industry, and that got us thinking about the coalfields of North Somerset, made famous from the movie The Titfield Thunderbolt. After a period of research, we decided that the area would fit the bill, and the whole layout snowballed from there, using the premise that the branch line only came into existence to serve the colliery.”
Set in the late 1950s to early 1960s, the club used Peco’s Bullhead Code 75 track for most of the scenic section of the layout, but at this early stage of the build they encountered their first problem.