Paul A. Lunn takes a look at how layout planning and design has changed through the years… and ponders what the future may hold.

Artwork & photography: Paul A. Lunn

Masterplan Inspiration

Track plans to get you thinking in three dimensions

It’s fitting, in our 300th anniversary issue, to take a retrospective look at layout planning and design, examining early developments, current practice and future prospects. Space won’t allow me to include everyone worthy of recognition – Roy Link, David Jenkinson, Iain Rice, Chris Nevard – but I’ve included a selection o leading lights who have influenced my own efforts.

Many of these individuals, with overlapping timespans, have certainly influenced each other and while there are brief accounts here, relevant especially to design and planning, their full stories can be found tucked in among text and plans in their own publications.

This Weymouth-inspired circuit is a collection of what, for me, are the best features in any compact design. It’s organic, with little or no track running parallel to the baseboard edge, dramatic terracing from the river, rising towards the backscene, with forced perspective towards the rear. Circuits are particularly useful, over a shelf layout of the same length, particularly in this case for boat trains.

My plans are rarely completely finished and every time I revisit, some sort of refinement comes to mind. In this case I’d swing the siding, bottom left, out towards the edge of the layout creating space between it and the outer loop, right, you could then add another siding, from the loop, running parallel to the siding previously moved.

ROOTS

Edward Beal, 1889-1985

Beal’s skill for sharing ideas has been ‘preserved’ in an excellent range of books. This collection of track plans, some North American in interpretation, are outstanding. His priority for modelling was an “understanding of railway practice, commencing with a predetermined ‘must-have’ list and mindfully considered to suit available space.”

He was much admired for his ‘West Midland Railway’, which was frequently revised and rebuilt.

More operationally effective than scenically outstanding, it was not as ground-breaking as John Ahern’s ‘Madder Valley’.