Ticking the box

I may not be in the same modelling league as Chris Nevard and others, but I’m very critical of my own modelling – generally only scoring myself at 5 out of 10. Occasionally I get a 6, but building roofs always seem to cause me problems and often I only score a 3!

With Halwill Junction Signal Box, there were no plans to work from, only photographs and one dubious ground plan of the whole station site – the latter giving a roughly scale footprint for the signal box. After a lot of thought,

I decided to get the windows 3D-printed first and then build the signal box around them.

The building is constructed from plastic card and readily available embossed plastic card. Unfortunately, there wasn’t any embossed ‘shiplap’ of the correct scale size, so the main woodwork is produced using tongue and groove joins. Although the signal box is pure LSWR, I would hope that the colours are reasonably accurate for BR(W) for the 1950s/1960s following its takeover of lines west of Exeter Central in the early 1950s – although reasonable quality colour photos from the 1960s are quite rare.

The extension to the signal box, with its ‘flat’ roof nearest the camera, was built in the 1920s with the arrival of the North Devon and Cornwall Junction Light Railway from Torrington.

I have no idea how long I’ve spent building the signal box, but it certainly adds up to many, many hours. I have to thank Chris Knowles-thomas for allowing me access to his photographs and Tony Heselden for producing the 3D-printed windows.

Martin James