 If you buy the British Model Railway press, some of you may be familiar with my occasional ramblings and commissioned photography of layouts featured in Model Rail and Hornby Magazine. This website is a chance to me to prove that I also mess about with the hobby in my spare time when not looking through a viewfinder or tapping on a keyboard. It's also really nice to have an escape in this world that doesn't need 'F functions' or digits - and if you get it all wrong 'CTRL Z' won't undo ones mistakes (as my wife says "neither do I")!
Combwich took far too
long to get to the current
stage, what you see here started in 1980. Over the years various bits of it have been replaced and
modified, I think now it
has reached its final stage. The track, baseboards, signalbox and station buildings are the only
original bits dating back to
the early stages. Most of the other bits like landscape were revamped fully from 2000 onwards after
15 years storage. The wharf and river were recent additions too.
Cement Quay & Arne Wharf and now Catcott Burtle have
taken far less time, months
rather than years. These days I have less patience and get bored quickly, so keeping the layouts
small is the way to go if
ever they are to get to some stage of completion. However saying this, a large simple roundy roundy
does appeal - as I
imagine sitting back with a pint of something nice watching a long freight train winding around the
room .....
 All four layouts are portable, the three most
recent being very much so. The odd time I do a show I'm generally a one man band, so things need to
be simple with the minimum amount of hassle. Combwich is 'portable' but not in the same sense as
the other three. It does make it out onto the road from time to time but needs a van and a posse!
By contrast, Cement Quay, Arne Wharf & Catcott Burtle can be simply popped into the back of the car
with the rear seat down.
Catcott Burtle, a
could have been scenario is heavily influenced by the BBC TV film Branchline Railway, with the
layout's creator being taken in by the wild open feel of the area much dominated by willow, water
and big skies.
Many spots where roads crossed the railway utilised manned level crossings rather than bridges,
with each crossing having its own crossing keeper and railway cottage. Several of the cottages had
no running water or electricity right up to closure in 1966, the water being delivered by train in
milk churns!
Catcott, one of the many crossings on the line never was a halt or had sidings. In the parallel
universe world here, imagine if to serve the local peat deposits things had been very different?
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