Lyncombe Vale

 

- a OO gauge Somerset & Dorset layout 17 years on

 

 

‘Lyncombe Vale’ first appeared in TCH, as a two part Layout of the Quarter article, in September and December 1998. This article outlines the changes that have taken place since that time.

 

1995 saw construction start on this layout, with no real plans as to how long the layout would exist, or what it would become over the years. Twenty years on and the layout has changed considerably since it was first shown at the AMRA Train Show in May 1996. The layout story in the two articles in 1998, outlined how the layout had progressed through stages 1, 2, 3 and 3A. We decided to give exhibiting a two year rest after the last show of 1998, mostly because our eldest son Andrew, who was one of our main helpers at train shows, was doing grade 11 and 12 during 1999 and 2000 and would not have the time to help us. Also, after doing five shows a year for three years, the layout was starting to suffer from over exposure and Lyn and I had to decide, do we scrap this layout and build another one, which we were thinking about at the time, or do we apply some finer detail to ‘Lyncombe Vale’ and continue to exhibit again in 2001.

 

Figure 1 - Entering ‘Lyncombe Vale’ Station, is 2P No 40569 with the 4 coach 3.40pm Bath to Templecombe stopping train.

 

Some research was undertaken and we thought about building a new layout based on ‘Wincanton’ from the Dorset section of the S&D, but by this time, the emotional attachment to ‘Lyncombe Vale’, had become too great. This was a family layout, built by Lyn, Andrew, Stephen and myself, with some BRMA friends helping with the construction, during the early stages of the layout.

 

Decision taken, scrapping ‘Lyncombe Vale’ was out of the question. So onto the construction of stage 4. After exhibiting in 1997 and 1998 with the layout in its rectangular format, one of the ongoing problems with the 3.6m x 1.2m internal operating area, was the congestion caused when all three layout operators, were sharing this space. At first, we were only going to push the internal depth out to 1.5m, making it easier to pass behind the control panels, whilst walking up and down the length of the operating space. This adequately solved the problem of crowding, but Lyn and I were never happy, with trains coming straight off Watery Bottom Viaduct into the station, so with two years of not exhibiting up our sleeve, we decided to lengthen the layout by 1.6m as well. This would improve the prototypical look of the layout, providing trains with a longer run through the countryside, between Watery Bottom Viaduct and Lyncombe Vale station. With the fiddleyard also 1.6m longer, we could now run full length prototypical summer holiday trains, as were seen regularly on the S&D. The result was, a layout with overall dimensions of 6.5m x 2.5m, with an internal space of 5.2m x 1.5m. The new baseboards were built 0.5m wide, to match the existing boards, with the length being dictated by what would fit in the back of our car.

 

 

Having decided to extend the layout by 1.6m, our thoughts turned to what sort of scene should we create on this new baseboard, so we watched the Ivo Peters video which covered this part of the line. There were a couple of shots showing the scenery looking south, after the train had passed over Watery Bottom Viaduct, these showed the train passing through a cutting, so we replicated this as best we could, in the confines of the 0.5m wide baseboard. We could have just grassed the section in front of the cutting, with long grass, bushes and trees, but we decided to include a farm scene, which you will be able to see from some of the photos included in this article.

 

Figure 2 - An up coal train from Norton Hill Colliery passing through the cutting behind Lyncombe Farm on it’s way to the Bath Gas Works. The lady of the house is chasing the farm cat outside, whilst the local coal merchant is delivering coal for use in the farm house.

 

This all sounds simple doesn’t it, a single piece of track across a board with some scenery on it, then just extend the 10 fiddle yard tracks across that baseboard. Well a saying comes to mind, ‘the best laid plans of mice and men’. The first hurdle was, that our train room is only 5.9m long, which means that the stage 3A, 4.9m configuration of the layout fits with a meter to spare, but a 6.5m layout obviously will not fit, so the first right hand end scenic and fiddle yard boards, plus the centre board, were removed and put into storage. This then enabled us to bolt in, what is now called the farmyard board, between Watery Bottom Viaduct and the main station. Laying the track across this new scenic board and lining up the single track with the track alignment on the two boards either side of it, was easy, connecting the power did not take long, with trains soon running from the station, to the first part of the fiddleyard. Basically we had a terminus to fiddleyard layout, while construction was happening. This meant that the farmyard board could easily be used at train shows and left out at home, we made sure all scenery at the joins matched up, so it was not obvious a board was missing when the layout was at home. 

 

Next, the new fiddleyard board was bolted in. The hard part came when we needed to match up the ten tracks plus some points on the existing fiddleyard that were very close to the baseboard join. It took quite a bit of planning and some deft track laying skills to get everything to align for either the 4.9m or 6.5m version of the layout. The next challenge was wiring up the new fiddleyard baseboard. It needed extra points on it to make some of the tracks match up with the existing boards either side of it, so some new point and cab switches had to be installed, requiring some rewiring of the yard control panel.

 

Figure 3 - The three new baseboards forming the 45˚ angle left hand corner, built in late 2002 and early 2003.

 

With two years to finish all the work outlined above, it was all completed in plenty of time to get back on the exhibition circuit in 2001. But there was still that one remaining niggling problem, that short section of 18˝ curve, just after Watery Bottom Viaduct, left over after the stage 3A rebuild of the scenic/spacer end board. This had to go, as it was still causing problems with some rolling stock, which was just not designed to get around this sharp curve. Having taken the decision that this curve had to go, we then had to think about when do we do this, as it is major work with a capital M, because both the Watery Bottom Viaduct board and the scenic/spacer end board, which had already had one rebuild, would have to be nearly stripped back to bare baseboard, to allow for the re-aligning of the track to get a larger radius curve. We decided we would put up with this tight curve, until the end of the 2002 exhibition season, we had already decided not to exhibit during 2003 because our younger son Stephen would be doing grade 12. With the last show for 2002 being in September and the first show we planned to attend in 2004 not until May, this gave us 19 months to complete this major rebuild.

 

Figure 4 - This photo clearly shows the old 18” curve and the new 24” curve and how brutally I cut away the original scenic embankment and tunnel to facilitate the new track alignment.

 

Stage 5, okay the 18” curve is going, but what size curve should replace it? To answer that I thought let’s have a look at the prototype track plan and yes, the track was on a very gentle curve between Devonshire and Combe Down Tunnels, but this is not possible on two 0.5m wide baseboards, bolted together at right angles, as the curve in 4mm scale would need to be something like 12’ or larger. Well, modellers compromise has to happen, but I wanted to minimise this, so I came up with the idea of building 3 new baseboards of various sizes, that would allow the track to be on a 60” radius curve, this meant that the Watery Bottom Viaduct board, would be on a 45˚ angle to the main frontage of the layout. I got stuck into this and had the baseboards built and bolted to the layout in a week, track was then laid to the 60” radius mentioned, with the new track wired up, trains were running around the layout again within the following week. Long passenger trains looked superb on this curve, so I scratch built a new viaduct and started to build up the scenic profile on the end spacer board, but the more I got done, the more doubts I kept having that it was not going to look right. There was also the problem of rebuilding the inside of the carry frame to accommodate these new odd shaped baseboards. I couldn’t do this myself, as I don’t have the ability to weld steel. Also, from an aesthetic point of view, the complete layout did not look right anymore, one end was at right angles and the other at 45˚. The more I thought about it, the more I realized how many other things would have to be changed, rebuilt, repainted or manufactured to finish off this radical change to the layout. It is hard to remember now, when I finally decided to abandon the 45˚ angle idea, but it was quite some time into the 19 months I had set aside to undertake this rebuild, so a lot of time, energy and materials were now wasted!

 

Figure 5 - An overall view of both baseboards, before I started to rebuild the scenery.

 

I had not done anything to the layout for some months and I was lying awake one night, when a light bulb turned on in my head, with an idea of how to get a 24” curve around that corner of the layout, using the original baseboards, this would not be a huge increase from 18”, but could it work? It was the September 2003 school holidays, so Stephen was home, I dropped Lyn off at work, came home and went straight to the train room. I put the two original baseboards up on my work bench, placed them together, grabbed my 24” radius former, placed it over the corner of the two baseboards and yes, I was fairly sure it would work. Stephen eventually got out of bed and helped me put these two original baseboards back in the layout, he thought I was ‘nuts’ after spending so much time working on the 3 new ones!

 

By this time I had stripped all the buildings, tunnel mouth and trees off the original spacer board to use on the new one and I had chopped up the formed scenery around the viaduct, removing this to maybe use on another layout in the future. Now with only 7 months to go before the AMRA train show in May 2004, I was embarking on re-aligning and relaying the track on these two boards, putting all the buildings and viaduct back in place, plus redoing all the scenery and trees that were on this corner of the layout. No wonder Stephen thought I had lost my marbles! Right, baseboards bolted back in place, now onto the track re-alignment, I placed the 24”radius former over the original scenic embankment, then using a heavy marking pen, marked out where the track now had to go. The original scenic material was ripped out quickly, as it was only made from fruit box foam, then out with the 4” angle grinder to sand off the glue and smooth the ply ready for the new cork underlay and track. Resetting the viaduct was a slightly slower procedure, as it had to be mounted at a different angle to the front edge of the baseboard to get the 24” curve to run onto it smoothly. Fortunately I had not ripped out the wiring under these boards, so it could be plugged straight back in to get trains moving again.

 

Figure 6 - The 9.25am (Summer Saturday only) Bournemouth to Manchester and Liverpool coasts down the 1 in 50 gradient towards Bath, passing Lyncombe Farm as the farmer repairs his tractor, while the Bath Bus struggles up the hill above the railway cutting.

 

Now came the messy job of putting back the foam where required, including relining the tunnel for the new track alignment, then creating a foam lid to glue over the tunnel.  The foam was shaped in the usual manner with knives and Surform files until it was the correct shape, then covered with nappy liners soaked in a slurry of dark brown casting plaster and allowed to dry before a final coating of the brown plaster, to get the look I wanted.

 

Next job was to get all the ground cover back on the brown plaster, put all the buildings and trees back in place, reset the cameo scenes and do all the final fiddly finishing off that is required to get a layout ready for exhibiting. Mostly this all went smoothly, with a small amount of damage on some buildings requiring repair and one building that was so damaged, it had to be replaced. Since the completion of this major rebuild, we have exhibited the layout in 2004, 2005 and 2007.

 

Figure 7 - BR(SR) “Battle of Britain” Pacific No. 34067 “Tangmere” with the 9.55am Bath to Bournemouth down semi-fast, as it enters the cutting behind Lyncombe Farm with the farm workers about to take their morning tea break.

 

There are five structures on the layout that were scratch built from photographs, these being the two tunnel mouths, Watery Bottom Viaduct, the small viaduct just before Combe Down Tunnel and the footbridge. These structures really help to give the layout authenticity. However, having now actually been to the site, during our holidays to the UK in 2010 and 2012 we now know that the footbridge was in fact built of blue engineer’s brick, not the stone we used to model it. Considering the amount of work involved to rebuild and replace the bridge, I think we will just put this one down to a lack of accurate photographs and a bit of modellers licence. Actually, the whole station area, goods yard, timber yard and engine shed are all modellers licence, as the idea for modelling a station at ‘Lyncombe Vale’, came from information quoted in a book, The Somerset & Dorset Railway by Robin Atthill, where he mentions the declined proposals for stations on each side of Devonshire tunnel, to serve the expanding suburbs of Bath. Now even if Beeching had not closed the S&D and these stations had been built, they probably would have been only a halt, certainly not the elaborate station we have on our layout, but it provides much interest for patrons at train shows with all the continual shunting that we do. It definitely makes the layout more interesting than just watching a train run down a single piece of track through a heavily wooded vale.

 

Figure 8 - BR standard class 4, 4-6-0 No 75073 normally seen on passenger train turns, but now looking a bit the worse for wear, has been relegated to goods train duties, prior to going into the workshops for a refit and repaint.

 

We will probably never have a full selection of all the locos, coaches and wagons that ran on the S&D, basically because some would have to be kit or scratch built, which is not one of my better modelling skills. Over the last 20 years though, we have gathered together a good collection of locos and rolling stock, from the RTR ranges that have become available, to give a realistic S&D feel to ‘Lyncombe Vale’. This became even more so when in 2010 Bachmann released a beautiful model of the famous S&D 7F 2-8-0s, No’s 53806, 53809, & 53810, then in 2012 they also released 53808 as it was in the late British Railways livery before withdrawal, as well as No.88 in Prussian blue, as preserved by The Somerset & Dorset Railway Trust, based at Washford, on the West Somerset Railway. None of the 11 S&D 7F’s built, were ever painted in Prussian blue, they were all black, as was normal practice for a locomotive that was specifically designed for hauling coal and freight. Lyn and I have seen No.88 in the flesh and in steam, on both of our trips to the UK. I even got a ride on the footplate in 2010. It actually looks stunning in Prussian blue and I hope they never repaint it black.

 

‘Lyncombe Vale’ has not been exhibited since 2007 and we probably will never exhibit it again, because we and the wonderful team that assisted us have all got older. It is now just too big a task to even contemplate. At 6.5m x 2.5m and comprising 10 modular baseboards, it is a huge job to get it to a show. Firstly, there is all the preparation work for a month before a show, to ensure all the locomotives are running well and the layout is in top notch order, then once at the show, at least 4 to 5 hours setting it up, operating for 2 to 3 days, then pulling it all down, getting it all home and setting it up again. We are hoping that sometime in the future, we may have the time and finances to build a small terminus to fiddle yard layout, that will fit in our X-Trail, so we can take it to shows on our own without the need of a large trailer, a carry frame and a team of 8 people to help us operate it. Over the 7 years or so since we last exhibited, we have spent our time helping other members build their own layouts.

 

Figure 9 - A local farmer having just off loaded his cattle, will soon head back to his farm, while 7F No.53810 slowly makes it’s way through Lyncombe Vale Station on it’s way to Bath Gas Works with a train load of coal.

 

Lyn and I never envisaged ‘Lyncombe Vale’ becoming one of those lifetime layouts, which we would keep extending and changing over so many years when construction of Stage 1 commenced way back in 1995, but it looks like that’s what it is going to become!