INSIDE LOOK

Various segments of his layout have featured in Model Rail over the past few years, but Grahame Hedges’ mission to recreate London Bridge station and its environs in 2mm scale is really beginning to take shape.

PHOTOGRAPHY: GRAHAME HEDGES

London Bridge is my long-term ‘N’ gauge layout project. It is not the first 2mm scale layout I have built, but it is the first to be permanently based at home. Previous layouts, ‘Hedges Hill Cutting’ and ‘Stoney Lane Depot’, were both portable and taken to several exhibitions over the years. However, age has crept up on me and I’m no longer comfortable in lugging layouts around, setting them up, dismantling them a day or two later and taking them back home.

For me the layout is a major project and is taking time to progress. The slow progress is due to a few factors. Firstly, it’s a one-person project and I’m undertaking everything myself. Also, with the layout being based on an actual location, all the structures and buildings (and there are plenty of them) have to be researched and individually scratchbuilt. Indeed, the processes involved in creating several of the key structures have been described in various issues of Model Rail over the past few years (see panel).

My aim in building the layout was to have commuter trains from the 1970s and ‘80s, that I used regularly, running at an elevated level, winding through a recognisable landscape of commercial buildings, industrial structures and residential roof tops, all based on a real urban location. I appreciate that a gritty urban scene is not everyone’s cup of tea, but hopefully it is something different and provides interest and contrast to the more common bucolic rural idyll setting.