Category: Miscellanea

In planning my next model railway, I want to improve on a few things from Phoenix Yard. One surprise I had in building that from just a trackplan was how much of the model I had to subsequently improvise. So this time I’m going to try to build a scale model first.

This is my first cut at a 1/10th scale model of my 1/76 model:

The gridded paper has a grid that will be 50mm on the ‘full-size’ model. The near vertical pieces are intended to be chalk cliffs, and the lozenge/bunker object in the corner is intended to be the concrete oil storage facility – inspired by Micheldever.

This has already been a useful exercise. I had to reject the configuration ‘in my minds eye’ as it simply couldn’t be constructed. This design then emerged, from my attempts to scale off the photos of Micheldever I found online.

There is a clear problem with this model if you measure it off – the vertical dimension will be 90cm, and easily a meter once I’ve allowed for under track space for bracing, etc.

Hard to pick out is a small tent shape in front of the oil bunker – that is a scale representation of a TTA tank wagon.

If I want a more compact and manageable model, I clearly need to rethink my design.

I’m in the slow process of planning a successor to Phoenix Yard.

Having enjoyed the operation of the inglenook format, I want to stick to that. However, I do want to draw some scenic inspiration from the real railway.

Thinking about locations that had a simple lineside set of sidings, I remembered Micheldever Oil Terminal:

View 51.187521, -1.258965 in a larger map

I travelled past quite frequently in the 1990’s, and it seemed to be sporadically active. More recently it seems to be used for occasional storage of surplus stock.

The facility seems to be a large concrete bunker built into a chalky hillside. There is a handy photo at Geograph, which I’m using to understand the relationship of the concrete bunker to the surrounding chalk hillside.

It was a sunny day recently, so time for some more photography. As you can see, I’ve bought some more locos recently!