Build a scenic foundation

Prompted by the imminent arrival of Model Rail’s ‘16XX’, Chris Leigh shows you how he went about researching and building an industrial branch line layout.

Cod and chips twice, please.” “Salt ‘n’ vinegar, Duck?” This is the extent of the conversation that goes on in my local chippy.

Fish and chips, that British staple, is probably one of the few meals which still involves vinegar in any quantity. But that wasn’t always so. In the days before refrigerators, many foods were preserved by pickling them in vinegar.

Hill Evans & Company, based at Lowesmoor in Worcester, became the world’s largest vinegar brewer, with an output that reached over two million gallons annually, a record it held for a century. Its closure in 1967 was, no doubt, largely a result of the change to preserving foodstuffs by refrigeration, particularly the post-war expansion in domestic fridge ownership.

I never knew the Vinegar Works branch at Worcester and, to my eternal regret, I rejected an opportunity to do so. During a railtour to Worcester Shrub Hill in 1965 behind No. 4079 Pendennis Castle, my colleagues took a brief look at Worcester shed and the works before setting off to walk the branch. I had never heard of it and it did not sound very interesting, so I stayed behind to take a good look at Nos. 1420, 6435 and 4555 that were being overhauled for the embryonic Dart Valley Railway. Looking back now, I made the wrong choice.

The impending arrival of our ‘16XX’ No. 1660, complete with ‘Vinegar Castle’ graffiti, offered the opportunity to model a favourite railway scene, that being the

view along the street in Worcester to the Vinegar Works branch level crossing protected by semaphore signals. However, lack of research material meant that it would need to be a model inspired by the Vinegar branch road crossing rather than a slavish re-creation.

With winter fast approaching, I decided to install Dapol’s working lower quadrant signals and to light the pub with a nice warm glow on the ground floor to provide a nice wintry look for photographs. Just the right kind of atmosphere when hot fish and chips would be most welcome.