Workbench

area, requires an understanding of the setting, and I can’t get that knowledge and insight without going there. However, my colleagues Peter Marriott and Chris Nevard have made very believable W&u-style mini-layouts without (so far as I know) going walkabout in the Fens. For me, an important part of the inspiration behind a project is the closest possible knowledge of the actual place. I have five books on the W&U (see references list), a 25-year-old OS map, and a handful of colour photographs which I took soon after I came to work in Peterborough, some 25 years ago. The greatest success from that 1990s visit was finding Outwell Village depot intact, albeit devoid of track. The goods office and a grounded van body were still there and you could easily visualise where the sidings had been. I knew that was no longer the case. Today, the site is occupied by a small development of canal-front houses called ‘The Tramway’. However, at the rear of one of these houses is the only surviving W&U building, the goods office. This little square, red brick building was a standard design used at several of the tramway depots. It was Grade Ii-listed by English Heritage in 1990. Although somewhat hemmed in by construction on three sides, it fronts directly onto the street adjacent to the village shop and even has its original door and letterbox. Beside the goods office, the tramway emerged from its gated yard, crossed the road at the foot of a brick bridge over the canal, and carried on towards Upwell with the canal on its right and a narrow road to its left. Beyond the road were farm fields. Photographs of trams leaving the yard show a distinctive shop on the opposite corner of the crossroads. In post-war photographs it appears as a general store Left: During my 1990s visit I was able to measure the Outwell goods office. Note the distinctive double doors and the exposed roof timbers – well worth modelling. DIANE LEIGH

Above: The goods office today. and off-licence. The building is still there but its shop front has gone and it is now a private dwelling. Beyond there, the course of the tramway is, these days, nothing more than a broad grass verge above the bank that drops down to Well Creek, as this section of the old River Nene course is known. For our purposes we’ll call it all ‘the canal’. At Goodmans Crossing, Goodmans Farm is still there and here the tramway crossed the lane and headed into Upwell depot, its terminus. The surviving part of its trackbed is now a farm drive, marked only by a ‘Trains cross here’ sign bolted to a fence post. It is private land and, beyond it, the site of Upwell’s extensive depot with its 11 sidings, capable of holding 100 wagons, has completely disappeared under development. My walkabout on the tramway allowed me to soak up the local atmosphere and the ‘look’ of the area, sufficient to see that in their two compact layouts (MR257) Peter Marriott and Chris Nevard have got it just right. Can I do the same, I wonder?