Layout: Illie Town
Buying a second-hand layout gave father and son duo Keith and Aaron Smith a headstart on creating an exhibition-standard layout. But they soon discovered that they’d bought a bit of a doer-upper…
How two modellers bought a ‘pre-loved’ layout and brought it up to exhibition standard.
There are many advantages to buying a layout second-hand. It can be a great way of kick-starting your layout building, particularly if it means you can skip some of the areas you aren’t as confident with, such as building baseboards. Buying a layout can also be a great time-saver, but you will still need to spend some time turning it into your own and fixing any problems that may become apparent under rigorous testing. After buying what would become ‘Illie Town’ for a couple of hundred pounds, father and son duo Keith and Aaron Smith set about bringing it up to the exhibition condition it is in today.
“We had a layout in my shed called ‘Bridge Street’ for 24 years and were no strangers to model railways,” says Keith, “but we made one mistake in the 1990s – we didn’t apply enough bracing to the Sundeala board and it had sagged in places. Keen to be the owner of a working model railway, Aaron bought a layout we would rename ‘Illie Town’ and, as we knew we’d need the shed for storage, our old layout had to be broken up.”
It was only once the pair got the layout home and onto Keith’s kitchen table that they discovered a problem with their new purchase.
“Nothing would move at all! Upon closer inspection we discovered that a couple of the points were very problematic and there were barely any dropper wires,” says Aaron. “We decided, in a moment we would later determine to be slightly rash, that we could sort the electrical problems cheaply by adding extra wires so
that we weren’t relying on the connecting fishplates. Eventually, we concluded that replacing the faulty points and adding in frog changeover switches would be the best way to go. We wanted to keep the original points because we both liked the all-steel check rails rather than the modern plastic ones. After a phone call with Peco to check that we could use them with DCC, we had success, and haven’t had a problem since. A big thank you goes to Peco for suggesting that we could just solder a wire to the base of the frog!”
TIME IS OF THE ESSENCE
As most of us who build model railways know, having a deadline is often required to give us the impetus to make progress. These could be personal goals which don’t matter too much if they slip, or immovable deadlines such as Keith and Aaron faced.
“There was an awful lot to do on the layout but Aaron had got us an exhibition booking for October of that year, not ten months away. That meant it had to spend a lot longer on my table! I was happy that we had the track operating smoothly and most importantly, reliably, and now I had the opportunity to work on the scenery. The primary goal, as it had been all the way through, was to do it as cheaply as possible. That, coupled with the need for quick building, led to me using kits for the majority.”
Upon first glance of ‘Illie Town’, it’s the traction maintenance depot that catches your eye. Imposing a dominating feature on the right-hand side, this single Peco shed has been improved with internal illumination, weathering on the exterior and the addition of plenty of prototypical warning signs. At the other side of the junction, Keith used Metcalfe kits and plaster buildings from Ten Commandments to create a street-level scene with customised shop fronts.
“We wanted to keep the original points because we both liked the all-steel check rails rather than the modern plastic ones”
“My daughter is much more literate with the computer than I am so she printed out some shop fronts for me and I was able to stick them on. I recall getting a couple of comments from viewers at the first show afterwards about the realism of the Debenhams shop window. This was at the time when Debenhams was beginning to close a lot of its shops across the country and we had to explain that although there are locomotives that you can still see today, the layout is based around 2010 and is a snapshot of the period, rather than a rolling, up-to-date depiction.”
EXHIBITION ENTERTAINMENT
Aaron and Keith found themselves with the same considerations every exhibition layout has, how to keep the viewers entertained and a crowd around your layout.
“We have a more difficult time of that than with looped layouts,” outlines Aaron, “as we can’t just set a train going in each direction for half an hour while we have our lunch. One of us always needs to be actively operating to make sure there’s something to hold the viewers’ attention, which is difficult when we both like talking! To avoid any confusion I create a spreadsheet of movements for us to do which would take about an
hour and a half to go through the cycle. What it allowed us to do was for one of us to get distracted talking to the viewers or to go for a comfort break and we could come straight back into the action simply by being told by the other ‘move 32’. It made our life much simpler in a hectic exhibition hall where we make around 800 movements over the course of a weekend.”
Model railway exhibitions can be wonderful places to get inspiration and ideas with numerous top quality layouts and plenty of knowledge in the heads of the operators and viewers alike. Some viewers of ‘Illie Town’ were able to provide Aaron and Keith with some helpful hints to make their model even better.
“We didn’t know it until much later in the conversation, but the group of men who were looking intently at parts of our work, pointing and smiling at themselves were locomotive drivers. It was a strange encounter to begin with as Aaron was starting to get slightly annoyed, thinking that they were pointing out problems. It was only when we started talking and they explained that they enjoyed the layout and it could be made even better just with the addition of one more signal and a couple of TPWS pads between the tracks. After that exhibition we looked to add these to ‘Illie Town’ and came across a signal from Absolute Aspects which had two aspects and a route indicator, displaying either ‘1’, ‘2’ or ‘Y’ for the two platforms or the yard. It was quite an investment and slightly anti-climactic, in the sense that we know it’s there and it’s one of our favourite parts of the layout, but unless you look at ‘Illie Town’ from the exit of the fiddleyard you wouldn’t see it as an exhibition viewer.
“We’ve had a lot of fun so far building and exhibiting ‘Illie Town’ but it wouldn’t have been possible without the help of Malcolm Taylor, Trev Hurley and Stephen Seabridge who have helped us out at various points of the build. We also need to thank my wife and Aaron’s mum Eileen for putting up with the layout on the kitchen table for so long!”
“‘Illie Town’ shows that even with a relatively small amount of time at your disposal and trying to keep the costs as low as possible (excluding the costs of replacing a ruined kitchen table) it is still possible to create a fabulous-looking layout that’s worth a good look, once we’re allowed to return to the exhibition halls. With a programme of movements totalling an hour and a half, don’t think you’ve seen everything in one go, as having another peep on your second look around the hall will almost certainly give you something different to observe.”
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