Build a timber station
There’s nothing quite as satisfying as building a bespoke station, says Chris Leigh, especially if it is an exercise in modelling timber with timber.
Chris Leigh proves he can still cut it when it comes to modelling in timber.
If you start by reading my column on page 17, it will help you to understand my fascination with the timber buildings of the ‘Old Worse and Worse’, the Oxford, Worcester & Wolverhampton Railway. To be more precise, it was the section between Oxford and Worcester that particularly interested me, especially those stations which had not been substantially rebuilt by the Great Western. They were Handborough, Charlbury, Ascott-under-wychwood, Adlestrop, Chipping Campden and Fladbury. Of those, Charlbury was different. It still has its original station building, and it’s one of the Brunel Italianate ‘chalets’, the only surviving example in timber. Handborough, Adlestrop, Chipping Campden and Fladbury all had buildings based on a smaller standard Brunel design but executed in timber. They were basic in the facilities they provided and, initially, lacked sanitation, although the GWR provided that later; the ‘gents’ was usually in a separate brick-built structure. It is interesting to note that the GWR had rebuilt a number of these OW&W stations within 50 years or so of their opening, replacing the timber structures at Moreton-in-marsh, Stoulton and Pershore with standard brick buildings, presumably due to their condition, and redeveloping Honeybourne, Evesham and Kingham to cope with increased traffic. The modernised Moreton-in-marsh is soon to be the subject of a resin model by Oxford Rail.
WORSE FOR WEAR
Certainly, by the time they passed to BR, the few remaining OW&W timber buildings were falling into a poor state as they approached 100 years old. The rudimentary platform canopies were cut back and the buildings smartened up with a coat of chocolate and cream paint around 1960. Somehow, Handborough lost its canopy but missed the repaint, remaining in GWR light and dark stone until it was demolished in 1966. By this time, even if it had received a post-war repaint, it would have been 20 years since a paintbrush had last touched it – and it showed! Shabby and peeling, it had only Tilley oil lamps to light its platforms which, following the closure of the Blenheim & Woodstock branch in 1954, had been boldly labelled ‘Handborough for Blenheim’. I have two drawings of OW&W stations, one by ‘SCJ’, who I’m assuming to be Oxfordshire railway author Stanley C. Jenkins, and the other drawn by me for GWR Country Stations. They differ slightly in dimensions and detail and I would not wish to comment on the precision of either. They are both close enough for a decent model, however. Mine represents the building at Adlestrop, which differed in several respects from Handborough. I’m uncertain which building SCJ’S drawing is based on as it has the door and window arrangement of Handborough, but a shallow-pitched roof like Chipping Campden and Adlestrop. This poses the question, was the platform-side door and window arrangement originally the same on all three buildings? Had the external waiting room doors been replaced by a window at Adlestrop and Chipping Campden, while those at Handborough, like its paintwork, remained original? With the buildings and those who worked there long gone we are reduced to inspired guesses,
unless we are lucky enough to unearth a dated photograph of the right elevation. For the purposes of my model I grafted the main features of Handborough onto my Adlestrop drawing, which meant changing the height of the walls slightly, plus the pitch of the roof, and changing one window for a door. The doors on these buildings were a pair of narrow double doors, with a toplight above them. Before I began construction I had a very interesting exchange of e-mails with Geoff Thompson, whose ‘N’ gauge layout appears on page 22. We were able to swap photographs, which enabled me to reduce the amount of inspired guesswork in my model. In return, I was able to provide Geoff with a couple of my own photographs.