‘N’ GAUGE LAYOUT EBRIDGE
A legacy layout
Almost 40 years in the making, Phil Mason’s ‘Ebridge’ covers his entire modelling life and has moved with him, and with the times.
Words: Chris Gadsby
Photography: Chris Nevard Artwork: Andrew Mackintosh
“ What makes this layout great? ‘Ebridge’ has a legacy about it. This isn’t an exhibition layout where everything is perfectly modelled. It looks great, but Phil is able to look around the layout and recount modelling builds of years past that still find a home on ‘Ebridge’, a layout that covers his entire modelling life. ”
For a lot of people, an impending house move would result in the dismantling of their precious model railway, perhaps to be rebuilt, perhaps never to have a locomotive run across it again. This is particularly the case when layouts are built permanently into a room and cutting up the baseboards would result in an irrecoverable mess. However, life finds a way, and Phil Mason has always found a way to get his layout ‘Ebridge’ from one house to the next, and then the next, and then the next!
“Over the years the layout has been in six locations across four houses, before eventually finding what I hope will be a permanent home in my current loft. It started life in 1986 as a 9ft by 6ft layout in my terraced house and I’m still making alterations to it today. The concept has always been an ‘N’ gauge layout that would allow for both end-to-end running and a looped section in the same scene, which required a reversing loop. It was simple enough to do in ‘N’. The issue in the first house though was that I had a wrap-over section with the reversing loop hidden underneath the main station, which proved to be a nightmare whenever there was a problem as the whole station had to be lifted off. When I moved to my current home I put the layout in the loft but couldn’t lift the station off easily because of the roof trusses, and a 6ft wide layout proved to be too cramped, so I took the opportunity to widen it to 10ft. The lift off terminus station was then added as a ‘leg’ to one corner, giving me a total area of 18ft by 10ft.”