HOW TO BUILD A TIMBER PLATFORM
Architectural modelmaker Paul Braithwaite shares his method for building timber platform extensions to his model of Foleshill station.
PHOTOG RAPHY: PAUL BRAITHWAITE
I’m currently building a ‘OO’ gauge layout based on Foleshill, a former station on the Coventry to Nuneaton line. Built by the London & North Western Railway, the station later featured long timber platform extensions to the original brick-built structures. This was presumably owing to the vast development of industry in this Coventry suburb, resulting in rising passenger numbers.
Contemporary photographs of these later platforms show vertical posts along the front face of the platforms, without any angled bracing, as found at many other locations.
This begs the question of how stability was achieved, and I’ve also been unable to fathom how run-off water was dealt with, from the abutting banks of earth which lined the shallow cutting in which the line runs.
However, I chose not to delay progress on my layout by undertaking deep archive research, so it became necessary to do a little ‘inventing’. To make life a little bit more difficult, I didn’t have space to replicate the platforms to their full-scale length and they would have to feature curved sections, differing from the straight profile of the prototype.