Plant a station
Unhappy with one of his present stations, Chris Leigh decides on a complete rebuild – from the ground up.
Unhappy with his layout, Chris Leigh renovates the platform with a new building.
It is said that no layout is ever finished. I think that’s a good thing, and even if it is finished, I don’t think it hurts to rework some aspects of your layout from time to time. It’s a chance to refresh ‘tired’ scenery, repair damage and give the layout the benefit of your current skills, which will have improved since your previous effort.
My ‘OO’ layout is a simple oval, with stations on both long sides. The main station, St Petrock, follows Southern Region practice and has a booking office based on the Art Deco structure at Bishopstone near Newhaven. It is incomplete because I’ve managed to build the layout in such a way that access to the island platform is difficult. Nevertheless, so far, I’m happy with it and one day I’ll figure out how to reach the incomplete platform!
The secondary station is a different story. I had really wanted to make use of some resin structures by Bachmann, based on the Somerset & Dorset station at Shillingstone. I had a couple of timber buildings and a grounded coach body but not the main station building. However, this was enough for the Up platform as I already had a couple of Hornby buildings on the Down side. That platform is narrow and the Hornby buildings are a perfect fit.
What my layout lacked, however, was a Great Western station, and that irked me. I’m probably the only British modeller who is not completely captivated by the Somerset & Dorset. I recognise that I’m peculiar in that respect, but I only ever knew the S&D as a collection of derelict stations after it had closed. After much soul searching,
I decided that the Up platform and those S&D buildings had to go.
What followed, however, was hardly a simple choice. I have several GWR station buildings, including the Brunel-style Heyford, and the Oxford Worcester & Wolverhampton Railway’s Handborough, both scratchbuilt, and my
much-modified Oxford Structures model of Moreton-in-marsh (see MR249, July 2018).
Bolventor station occupies a site very close to the central opening from which the layout is operated. Buildings in this spot are quite vulnerable to accidental knocks so I decided that the Oxford Structures resin model would be more resistant to such damage. Once I had stripped off all the old buildings, I tried all three buildings in place and confirmed my suspicion. The Oxford model of Moreton-in-marsh it had to be.
It will, of course, be opposite Southern buildings on the other platform, but from most viewpoints you can only see one platform or the other. There are also precedents for buildings of mixed parentage. At Launceston and Lydford GWR and SR stations stood back to back and even had combined signal boxes, while at Dolgellau, the original Cambrian Railways station building was faced by a standard GWR structure on the opposite platform.
I also wanted to see if I could create a look of spaciousness, like the station on Pendon’s Vale Scene. This would mean that there were fewer structures near the baseboard edge to get damaged. As I prefer my stations to have accurate details in the form of fencing, platform equipment and signs, this gave me an opportunity to create both a Southern wayside station and a GWR station on the same site.