An Introduction

After 50 years of promising myself a layout, the time was at last right for me to turn that promise into a reality.

My aim in this book is to tell the story of how we built the layout of Leamington Spa and to pass on the benefits of all the lessons we learned. In doing so I hope that you will gain knowledge from our mistakes and replicate our successes as this book takes you through the process in a step-by-step fashion. The tasks I undertook were appropriate for anyone building a railway model and therefore can be adapted to a greater or a lesser degree to suit individual requirements.

Always start with research, research and yet more research!

Photos are the most important part of any research and I was soon to learn that you can never have too many. It helped that I knew the area for our layout well and that it had been photographed many times by local photographers. I was very familiar with the work of Dick Blenkinsop as I had avidly collected all his OPC books. When I found that there was one area that I could not get enough pictures of, I called one of my oldest friends, Roger Carpenter, whose knowledge of railway photographs is second to none. He told me about another photographer, Patrick Kingston, so with Dick and Patrick’s collections I started about the task.

I made over 20 visits to Leamington, taking over 1,000 pictures, and on my way home I’d always drop into Tyseley for a cup of tea with Bob Meanley. ‘I’­ve got something that might interest you,’ were his words of greeting one Saturday lunchtime and out of a big holdall came a leather bag of railway plans. They were the plans for Leamington Spa British Rail Western Region 1953, for rating purposes. What a find! This showed everything, even down to the lamp posts! It also became obvious, because it was now possible to see the full extent of the real railway layout, that we would need to make some compromises. To have built it exactly following the plans would have made the layout 230ft long and 30ft wide and, since I had no plans to buy next door’s garden, we had to look at ways to compromise. Here was our first major mistake. Even though we drastically chopped the storage sidings between the Great Western and the Avenue Station, it was still far too wide to reach across – and let me tell you, sod’s law dictates that if something is going to fall off, it will do so where you can’t get at it! The middle of our coal sidings, therefore, really became cosmetic and because the Coventry line bears off to the right and the Birmingham line to the left on the real railway, this is what we did on our layout.

Without question, the success of this project is in no small way due to those people who built the layout and I consider myself to have been very fortunate that the majority of our modellers were guys who were, and indeed who still are, part of the Manchester Model Railway Club – a club that has always stood out for its excellence.

What makes a railway model? Now, I realise that this means different things to different people but after a lifetime of seeing other people’s models and visiting such places as Pendon Museum, you start to get ideas. The first thing that became obvious to me was that I was not going to model another model layout. Personally, I think too many people have tried that and failed and it’s my opinion that if you want to model a railway, then model a real one. You can chop it about and make it whatever size suits but the fact that it’s a real one makes it easier in a strange way as there are rules to follow.

If not at the beginning of the work, then certainly by the end you will be multi-talented as a builder, carpenter, electrician, painter, engineer, architect and environmentalist – in other words, a dedicated Jack of All Trades! You will need to touch on areas that you’d never dreamed of before because you are about to play the Hand of God! However, the downside of this is that what the Almighty created in seven days, trust me, will take you considerably longer and it won’t be as good, but you will have to take some inspiration from the way that He did it.

So many times I look at models and see that although the modeller achieved a good quality, the lack of knowledge, or, more importantly, the lack of research into the environment that the model sits in, lets the whole thing down. One group of modellers who excel in research are military modellers who make dioramas. These are quite breathtaking but we must put them into perspective since they are probably 1/32nd scale and a big diorama is about 1ft. What we are trying to achieve is a massive diorama but with the added complication of moving parts! Even in a modest bedroom a layout of 6ft or 7ft is a big task – but not an impossible one. Our layout just needs a different approach and has to cheat the eye more than most other model layouts.

With all this knowledge on board we sat down and thought about how we would build our layout. At first it certainly was not in our minds to build Leamington Spa but we quickly realised that Leamington Spa had two things that we really needed: you can pretty well run most regions and locos through it and it stayed more or less unchanged right up to the mid 1960s so almost anything goes for visiting locos. This latter fact might well have been why most people would have elected Leamington Spa as the ideal layout but for us there was an ever bigger rationale at play and this was that you cannot see it all in one go. The railway is on a viaduct and goes in and out of chimney pots therefore it’s far more interesting to watch trains go by than it would be on just a flat board. This, coupled with seeing Dick Blenkinsop’s pictures, confirmed to us that we had picked the right prototype.

Leamington Spa it was then and this is its story and like every good tale there is a moral to it ­­– ‘Build a Dream and The Dream Will Build You’!­­

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