FIDDLEYARD

Railway modelling is a multi-faceted hobby, particularly when it comes to layout building. There are aspects that we enjoy, and there are those that we would prefer someone else to do for us. In nearly 30 years as a club member, I left the baseboard building, track laying and wiring to others and got on with the buildings and scenery. These are the things I enjoy and the aspects that I think I can do well. Whether we’re good at the things we enjoy, or we enjoy the things we’re good at, I’m not sure. However, I do know that, for me, the two go hand in hand. That changed with ‘Black Dog Halt’, the project layout that I built for Model Railway Constructor back in the 1980s, when I did everything except the wiring. Since then, on home layouts and projects such as my ‘O’ gauge ‘The Railway Children’ (based on Oakworth), I’ve even tackled basic wiring, though Dave Lowery built the baseboards for that project. However, I’m sure that if I had a railway modelling school report it would say, ‘he has problems with track alignment and wiring over baseboard joints.’ I’m well aware of it. ‘Black Dog Halt’ was fed with trains from a fiddleyard at either end. The join between fiddleyard and main baseboards at both ends passed through the backscene, and at one end it was additionally concealed by a road bridge over the line. The track alignment was thus quite inaccessible, but was also critical because the single line fanned immediately into sidings in one fiddleyard and a traverser in the other. Rails at the joints were soldered to copper-clad Paxolin in an effort to maintain the alignment, but it did not look good and misalignment sometimes caused problems at exhibitions. When I built ‘The Railway Children’, I couldn’t face having similar problems in the larger scale. The rail ends were soldered to brass screws so that, in an emergency, a soldering iron could be used to adjust the alignment. In fact, on the rare occasions when the layout was