LAYOUT CLUB

I was walking to work in Glasgow when something began to feel slightly odd.  The streets had different names. The signs looked American.  Red fire hydrants had appeared where there had never been fire hydrants before.   A Gotham City parking sign in the middle of Glasgow And then there was the snow...  Snow on the ground, in Glasgow, in August. A snowy "Lacey's" at Christmas, or a vacant Glasgow building in August? It took me a little while to realise that these streets, so familiar to me, had been transformed into Gotham City  for the filming of The Batman Part II .  Perhaps because I spend a rather unhealthy amount of my time thinking about and making a fictional place of my own, I became fascinated.  This was, in effect, a diorama. Just a very large one. I build Chandwell at 1:148. This was being built at 1:1. Apart from the size, the budget and the rather larger workforce, the differences were not quite as great as I might have expected. Buildings ...

Have you ever come across a photo of a structure and thought “that’d make a nice model” or “I’d like to make that”? Well, if you’re anything like me, this happens frequently. Inspiration often strikes when I’m browsing online, and generally when I’m looking for something else entirely. Generally, common sense prevails after asking myself  “do I actually need a model of that” or “why, when this has no relevance to anything else I’m doing ”. In this case, however, I really was taken by the photo I came across of the diminutive box at Grain Crossing and I decided to build a model, just to please myself. In its original format, the real box had three side windows, but these appear to have been replaced by two modern style UPVC windows in recent times. As I wasn’t really keen on the modern replacements, I decided to make a model inspired by the original, but not a direct copy. My model therefore has two side windows – albeit in the original style with three panes of glass – but more...

Well I managed one whole post about Butley Creek before my attention moved to another layout, but in fairness this is one I have been working on for some time.  Coursehorn is the manifestation of a long-held desire to model a Colonel Stephens light railway. It is also in part an homage to one of my favourite layouts, Old Parrock, but with the chocolate box dialled down and muddy puddles taking the fore. It's intended as the successor to my current exhibition layout, Rye Sands, but is really more of a passion project than the result of any pragmatic choice. The genesis of Coursehorn had parallels with that of Butley Creek - a few inspirational photos, a site visit to Rolvenden, and hey presto, a winning layout idea. I had been toying with schemes for a light railway terminus for months, if not years, but these were always too big and too generic - halcyon summer scenes that lacked that certain je ne sais quoi.  Come November 2025, and I stumbled back upon a wonderful image from...

A structure is a promise, a commitment to a project that goes beyond a collection of rolling stock. A deliberate act, to be incorporated into some future plan, a grand or humble scheme - a passenger train needs a station, so one is born… North American N scale is noticeably smaller than British N. My adventures in British N have taught me a lot about what to include in a model, and where to suggest or omit details in other ways. Textures in N full stop can be awkward and I often use 3mm and 4mm scale embossed sheet in my structures and creations. Denton Road is full of this stuff! That said, sometimes there is nothing suitable - then I have two options. One, use a printed texture (such as on Paxton Road’s  office) or scratch build the surface. Adding the final window frame, carefully cut from bog standard A4 paper and secured with glue-n-glaze PVA adhesive. I had found some drawings of ‘typical’ standard Canadian station buildings and had determined what I wanted to build. The pro...

A while ago I was asked to build a couple of Coke hopper wagons. These aren't a wagon type that have ever been on my radar to be honest and there aren't too many photos available either. As ever, the most useful starting point is Paul Bartlett's website: Paul Bartlett's Photographs | BR & PO Coke Hopper wagons HCO HCP In model form, there's an absolutely ancient kit available from Three Aitch and the more recent RTR offering from Hornby. To complicate matters, I was asked to build the solid sided wagons - these aren't offered by either of the aforementioned manufacturers. The RTR model, as available from Hornby First up, I have to say that I find the prototype wagons to be absolutely uninspiring and really hideous looking things! I was sent two Hornby models to use, and the bodies were duly sacrificed in order to make use of the rather nice underframes. They needed to be EM gauge, so the original wheelsets were utilised, albeit with re-gauged wheels. This is...

Since my first visit to Canada in 1989 I have held a desire to represent the emotions and feelings of the place and its railways in miniature. In the years that followed I visited a handful more times, different places but back home the same urge to create, to satisfy a yearning for the connection the railway offers to a nation forged on distance… I have worked on four, possibly five layouts with a Canadian theme. There have been successes, and perhaps some failure - but whilst I’ve enjoyed each and all of them I have struggled to create the wide open prairies of Saskatchewan and Alberta that I so vividly remember. Drumheller, Alberta. August 1989. James Hilton. The first, and perhaps closest encounter with success was a joint project with my late Dad, a man whose passion for Canada is, I’m certain, a large part of my fascination and connection with the place and its railways. I was working on a year in industry and spent the week in Macclesfield; I think the first I really remember of...

Every self-respecting village needs a shop. Unfortunately for the people of Butley Creek, theirs has closed down. Formerly the centre-piece of their little stretch of the old Orford Road, the luck of Messrs. Rice and Co. ran out with the arrival of the new supermarket in Wickham Market. The makeshift boarding-up of the storefront attests to the thin margins on which the residents of this part of the world live.  My approach to layout building is a little unconventional. It always starts, perhaps less surprisingly, with a photo, but this need not include any form of railway. First and foremost, it’s about atmosphere; the presence of tracks, if there are any, is a happy coincidence! More unusual still is the origin for Butley Creek - inspired, like its predecessors, by a photo. A dark, foreboding sky, over a ramshackle collection of Suffolk cottages. However, this photo did not depict any of the real, charming villages of the Suffolk Coast. It was instead a photo of the late Iain Ric...