I am not usually one for prototype modelling, on account of it needing some degree of skill to make it look like the original, be it locomotive, wagon or structure. However in this case the original was an item of some history, one which I was well acquainted with, and of sufficient vintage to be at risk of demolition in favour of something smarter and more suitable for current needs. Nothing less than the carriage shed of the West Lancashire Light Railway, at Hesketh Bank, near Preston. This was erected nearly four decades ago, when the schoolboys who started the enterprise were in their early thirties, and no doubt finding that raising families was interfering somewhat with playing trains.

 

The shed is built almost entirely of timber, some 64ft long and 14ft wide, and fitted with a pair of 2ft gauge tracks. It houses two bogie coaches and a brake van (the Railway’s standard consist for passenger trains) and an assortment of small diesel locos, in various states of repair. Those near the front are runners, used for galas and other special events, and those at the back are well, just parked there pending either restoration or dissolution back into piles of high-grade iron ore, whichever comes first. The gradient at the entrance can be a test for loco drivers, particularly at the end of a tiring day when putting away the stock on greasy rails. It doesn’t help that the coaches only just fit in front of the diesels, requiring some smart work with regulator and steam brake to get them accurately positioned so that the doors close.

 

Avid readers of the UK narrow gauge press may be aware that in the summer of 2019 the West Lancs succeeded in buying the land on which the Railway sits, whilst much of the adjacent land was sold off for housing. There was, and is, talk of developing the site with new, improved facilities, as funds and labour permit. The carriage shed is by some margin the scruffiest building on site, so it occurred to me that a model would help to preserve the character of the building, in addition to photographs and fading memories, should the Trustees decide an upgrade was in order.

 

So out came the long tape and the camera, and on a day when much of the stock was being pulled out into full daylight ready for the Working Engines Gala, I ventured into the depths of the shed, notebook at the ready. First thoughts were that a lot of coffee stirrers/lolly sticks would be required to represent the walls, and a good number of bean tins would have to be recycled to create the corrugated iron roof. Stripwood of various sizes would do for the framing and the cross-pieces, so it looked fairly straightforward to construct. The big decision was whether to build the model to represent the shed in its prime (around 1990) or in its latter years when old age was taking its toll. The former seemed much easier, so I opted for the early-years look. I could perhaps have distressed the wood to make it look more like it does now, but getting the angle of lean right for the walls would have been tricky...

 

So the model looked possible for my limited talents, but the next question was its setting. The Railway already has two 16mm layouts on the premises, Hundred End and the Middleforth Light Railway. The former is a fairly modest oval on a single, heavy baseboard, and the latter a long, narrow multi-board layout. One possibility was to build the carriage shed into one or other of these. However that would require some significant alterations, and I preferred the idea of a standalone exhibit that could be shown independently. A diorama might look good, done properly, but would be of limited interest to the mainly family-orientated visitors, not to mention the custodian charged with watching over it. More interesting would be to have a train moving in and out of the shed, using some form of shuttle unit.

 

Fortunately Fosworks has the Timpdon range of electronic wizardry under its wing, including a shuttle using reed switches and magnets to control the motion. It would seem possible to use this to send a train back and forth across a point and into the shed. The other tracks could contain small diesels, of which I have an embarassingly large selection, including a small wagon with a sound unit. As to baseboards, I have favourable experience of the open-box plywood units made by Grainge and Hodder, so a couple of their 1200 by 600mm offerings would fit the bill. Motley Miniatures could supply some suitable workpersons, and eBay some LED lighting.

 

Now a proper modeller would have insisted on building accurate models of the West Lancs coaches, diesel locos and guards van, to achieve a genuinely authentic layout. I am not that modeller, so I used what came to hand. The track length precluded bogie coaches, so I compromised with a pair of new ready-built 4-wheelers, again from eBay. The guards van was a solid, heavy scratch-built unit purchased at a show for a mere ten UK pounds, which seemed such good value I went back and spent five more plastic folding railway tokens on assorted coaches, for service on the domestic garden railway.

 

One model which did represent the real thing was a Phil Sharples Greenbat, a prototype of which languishes in the West Lancs engine shed awaiting a deep-pocketed sponsor with the wherewithal for new batteries. The scale version could sit either in the model shed or just outside. For the motive power to propel the coaches back and forth, I experimented with selected diesels from the home fleet, but none either looked right or could be persuaded to run both slowly and smoothly. So I opted for a Pdf Models Hunslet ‘Alf’, whose prototype was used at Huncoat Colliery, about 30 miles to the east of Hesketh Bank. I renamed it ‘Asland’ after the name given to the far end of the Railway’s main line, land relinquished when the site was purchased. It bears some resemblance to the Railway’s Hudswell Clarke mines loco, now restored and fitted with a cab.

 

With most of the materials to hand, I started on construction. The first thing was to make the bricks and blocks used for the base of the building, using a Jigstone mould with a plaster mix. In-between casting sessions I put together the baseboards, with the aid of wood glue and a medium-sized rubber mallet to encourage tabs into slots. Somehow two pairs of tabs went into the wrong slots, but the error was spotted before the glue set, which was a relief. A coat of grey paint on the top, and damp-proofing varnish underneath, and they were ready for decorating.

 

Marking out the position of the shed took some time, involving both scale and unit conversions, and only partially-successful attempts at not confusing the two. Eventually the scale size of the building become apparent, 1.2m to be precise, including the open doors. I decided to build these first, to prove that the wooden stick method of construction would work, or not as the case may be. The chosen material was a bit on the wide side, so each stick had to be painstakingly slit along its length before gluing together. After adding cross-pieces and paint they looked quite realistic. Next the end-frame was built and the top section above the doors, involving much slitting and angle-cutting. Putting it all together was awkward, requiring more hands than I had available to hold everything steady, but the result was pleasing, raising hopes that the project would actually be viable.

 

Whilst taking photos to record progress it occurred to me that a blog of the build on the West Lancs website might be mildly interesting for both blogger and potential blogees, and as I am the webmaster no-one could tell me not to. So I did. The last thing before departing on my 4th trip to the Darjeeling Himalayan Railway was to flood the interior of the shed with a wet mix of filler to represent the concrete floor. With luck it would be set and dried out by the time I got back.

 

Fortunately my luck held, both with the Indian excursion and the floor-laying, so on my return I could press on with painting the floor in concrete grey and gluing ballast around the external rails. I then realised that I should have wired the lights before starting to build the superstructure, as the cables needed to be run under the right-hand baseboard. Fortunately this was corrected without anything major sliding off the board when lifted up to work underneath.

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Then came the big job, making the side walls. The main part of the building is in four sections, joined by larger timber struts that support the roof joists. It seemed clear that prefabrication of a section at a time was the way to do it, rather than trying to erect the whole building frame in one go. The left-hand wall has two panels clad in wood and two in corrugated iron, so I started with the two wooden ones. A lot more trimming and slitting ensued, assisted by the purchase of a battery-powered cutting tool. Its mains-powered predecessor had started to emit bearing-failure noises and imminent-motor-failure smoke. After the first dozen or so sticks the work became rather tedious, but eventually they were done, and glued in place on a frame of 5mm square stripwood. The iron-clad sections were a little more complicated, involving cutting the ends off bean tins, and leaving the sides out in the never-ending autumnal rain for a couple of weeks to acquire a good coating of rust. After cutting to size and bending more-or-less straight they were glued and pinned to more wooden frames, remembering to overlap the upper ones over the lower, and not vice versa.

 

Erecting these prefabricated sections involved a combination of wood glue and plaster filler, and a lot of fiddling about trying to get everything vertical and in line. The results were encouraging, so I pressed on with more sections, fifteen in all, including the shed’s rear extension, slightly narrower than the main building and with a flat roof. It holds some of the Railway’s oldest and least-restored treasures, that have not seen the light of day for many a season. I made two of the wall sections removable, to permit access to areas beyond the reach of an arm poked in through the end doors. Eventually I had the complete shell of the model all standing up and looking not unlike the real thing. I took a few minutes off to feel pleased with myself.

 

Next came the roof. This is supported by a fairly complex set of square-section struts and vertical planks, most of which I modelled in one form or another. It took a while, but eventually I had a full frame ready for the wrinkly tin. This was more rusted legume container, weathered this time by never-ending winter rain, accelerated by an old shirt laid over the top and impregnated with a potent mix of salt solution and vinegar. Fixing the tin in place required a careful hand as the wood underneath was fairly fragile. Hammering in pins, even with pre-drilled holes, was a task fraught with risk of wholesale collapse. Eventually it was all done, and the building was essentially complete.

 

Now it was the turn of the loco. I had made up PDF Models kits before and found them fairly straightforward. The Alf loco was more of a challenge, partly because of the numerous rivets and vent louvres to be stuck on and partly because of the drive motion - all 60+ parts of it. However it all went together well, despite my lack of patience in getting some of the vents in the right place. The mechanism was sufficiently well engineered to withstand my construction attempts, and fired up more-or-less first time with a set of 4 AAA batteries attached. Honda Grey was selected as the main body colour, merely because I found a full can of it lurking on a lowly shelf in the shed. Why I originally acquired it has long since gone from memory. By judicious trimming of wires enough space was found in the body shell for the shuttle unit, which also worked first time. Or it did once I re-read the instructions enough times to correct some wiring errors and work out how to set up the magnets on a piece of test track.

 

The other main part of the layout was the trackwork on board no.2. This needed to at least resemble the reality, but space was very tight. After some trial and error I managed to fit in both the points leading into the shed and a short length of track leading off the side of the baseboard at an angle, towards the storage sidings and workshop access. What to do with the expanse of grey plywood was the next question - to resemble the original most of it should be rather uninteresting grey ballast. So instead I opted for scruffy grass, with occasional gravel, mud and suchlike, which gave scope for playing with a variety of scenic materials. To offer more interest, boxes of kindling, sacks of coal and a pile of ballast stones were added. Some spare point levers from Pendle Valley Models were pressed into service, with duckboards and gratings to match the prototype.

 

Back on the other board, one side of the shed was given over to a better style of grass with assorted flowers, and the other to a random collection of vitally-important-but-not-actually-used clutter. Every heritage railway has lots of this. A couple of wooden chairs were included, as a place to lurk unnoticed while quaffing mugs of tea, strength ten. And talking of baseboards, I had intended to build some wooden legs to support them at waist height. However I decided in favour of repurposing a pair of metal trestles, fresh from supporting roles with my other layouts. These were more robust, level, and most importantly, already in existence. A couple of small cradles were made up to help lift the boards without disturbing their contents, and promptly re-made with longer screws and more glue, after a potentially catastrophic structural failure during a test move.

 

With the model pretty well finished, all that remained was to install the magnets in their correct locations on the track, so that the train shuttled back and forth without either colliding with the stationary stock or running off the end. Frustratingly, it declined to do so, even when threatened with a phone call to Fosworks. After some to-ing and fro-ing with their ever-patient Geoff Garside, failed reed switches were diagnosed, probably caused by ham-fisted installation by yours truly. Then just as the shed was declared fit for public viewing, global lockdown happened and everything stopped for several months. Most frustrating, but in the greater scheme of things unfolding all around it was of little consequence. Virtuous patience was the order of the day, and in the meantime the carriage shed was photographed for the West Lancs Letter, edition eleven, and filed away safely in Garage No.2 to await calmer times.

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