Hello everybody. My name is Kev Smith and I'm better known over on the Z scale forum as the crazy englishman modelling the Espee in the Sacramento River canyon in Z from 5,000 miles away. What they are unaware of is that prior to going into Z my main modelling interest were buiding exhibition layouts in 0 gauge and gauge 1. The culmination of this was the most ambitious layout I ever attempted and with your indulgence I'll give you a potted history of... [h=1]Askam in Furness Railway station modelled in gauge 3[/h] Having built and exhibited two scenic gauge 1 layouts (Mardy Colliery and Gottersee) through the late eighties/early nineties I fancied a new challenge. I had always fancied a go at gauge 3 and saw that no-one had really attempted to do a fully sceniced gauge 3 portable layout before. Gauge 3 is, to all intents and purpose, the same as G scale but representing standard gauge rather than narrow gauge railways. Tying in with this idea was the discovery of the grade II listed station building at Askam in Furness with its Swiss chalet roof and a lot of original features still intact. Situated on the Cumbrian coast line north of Barrow in Furness the station is still on a quite busy line with regular passenger service and nuclear flask trains to and from the Sellafield nuclear plant to the North. The architects were the well known firm of Paley and Austin from Lancaster better known for their ecclesiastical work but also the designers of many of the distinctive stations on the Furness railway. Still present are the signalbox, which still leans forward as it has done for many years, the cattle dock and the up platform waiting room but the goods shed was swept away a few years ago to build and industrial estate. The original level crossing swing gates have been replaced with standard full width lifting barriers. Going through the county records office unearthed some copies of the original architectural drawings and ordnance survey maps. I have kept a constant photographic record of the station since the mid nineties and now have probably a thousand pictures of it, both overall shots and detail shots. The construction of the station building reflected the massive construction of the original and is 12mm MDF for the main structure with cast resin corner blocks and windows, it is a lot easier to make one prototype, take a rubber mould of it and then cast as many as you want. The wall in between the castings are clad in red DAS modelling clay and scribed to represent the sandstone stonework, individual stones are then picked out in different shades of sandstone red to bring the colours alive. As the building is six feet long you can begin to imagine how heavy it is! more in a few minutes KEV
The roof followed the drawings quite closely particularly in regards to the roof trusses and the supports for the roof overhang on the platform side. It is in three sections ticket office, main roof and the very complex roof over the gents toilets, which must count as one of the most ornate urinals ever built in the Victorian era. I had already made the decision to leave the roof unfinished and pose it as ‘under repair’ to allow people to see into the individual rooms which were all accurate representation of the state of them in the late nineties. So, it was half clad and partly slated and gauge 3 workmen were posed on it looking as if the were re-roofing it. It was designed to sit in a recess in the platform so that the rear wall and ground level was lower as on the prototype. Details like the tiled floor in the waiting room, hand scribed and painted, the working clock in the ticket office window and the representation of the original gas lamps made it quite fascinating for the public. In this form the building was exhibited at gauge 3 garden railway get-togethers, Cumbrian railway association events and model railway exhibitions as a taster for people to see what was to come. more soon KEV
What was becoming evident even at this stage was that the layout would have to be quite innovative to get the depth to do it all. It was going to have to be five foot wide in places, which meant two parallel rows of baseboards, and also getting on for forty foot long. In other words it was going to be huge to move around to shows and the flight case to take the buildings and stock were also going to be large as well compared to the gauge 1 layouts. However as the layout was being built and shown in the water tank building at Barrow Hill Roundhouse at the time space wasn’t really a problem at that stage of development. Part one of the video concentrates on the station building after its recent removal from long term storage and also looks at some of the freight and passenger trains that still pass the real one today. [video=youtube;ew_I9XdfXDY]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ew_I9XdfXDY&feature=share&list=UUI6p-eLL5zX3K226z27Josg&index=1[/video] coming next, the other buildings and rolling stock KEV
The signal box was modelled to represent the box as it was in the late eighties with accurate representations of the lever frame, block apparatus and furniture with the exception of the control gear for the level crossing as I was undecided whether to model the large, ship type, wheel that operated the swing gates or the push button stand that controlled the half barriers. Construction was again MDF but not as thick as the station building and once again DAS was used to represent the stone block work. It was designed to fit into a recess in the down platform to allow the steps down to the locking room. This was the only building that really was finished on the project
The Goods shed was not as big a problem as anticipated, the Furness Railway standardised on a small goods shed for many locations and a lot of them survive today and a word with the farmer who owns the one at Drigg meant I had a full afternoon to measure and photograph a similar one to Askam. As it was never intended for the public to see the rear only three sides were stone clad. On the video part two you start to get an idea of just how big this project was turning out to be as a relatively small building comes out as a massive model structure. Now the intention was always to have a full length backdrop at the backdrop layout and operate it from the front. This would allow us to represent a section of Duke Street in Askam including the Askam Co-op store. Originally separate shops which we were able to identify from an old land registry the whole block is now one store but the basic structure is still the same. Measurements were taken to represent the building in ultra low relief, it only measures 2 inch front to back. I had got as far as putting real curtains in the upstairs windows and making the displays for the shop windows. you can see how the area around the station gates was starting to come together
Now as gauge 3 is an obscure scale to say the least getting rolling stock was never going to be easy. I had started to model one of the Furness railway 2-2-2WT well tanks a while ago and once we had laid some track (using gauge 1 rail and white metal chairs) a few test runs soon gave an idea of the sheer mass and inertia noticed when running. It was all looking very promising. I next made some patterns for the things I knew I was going to need lots of, axleboxes, springs, buffer bodies etc and also tooled up to make a batch of the famous Lancashire and Yorkshire railway 0-4-0ST ‘PUGS’ on my pantograph engraver with resin castings for the sandboxes etc
Within a few months I had assembled some 5 plank open wagons, four wheel coaches, a horsebox and started on Furness No. 20 the celebrity 0-4-0 tender engine which is one of the oldest working steam engines in preservation. So, you ask, what went wrong? Why do we not see this layout out at the big exhibitions in the UK? Well, it was becoming apparent that the project was hugely ambitious for one man to do and assuming I got it in an exhibitable state it was going to take a 7 ½ tonne truck and a team of 6 to get it to a show. So for now it was O.K sat where it was in Barrow Hill. However, not long after that I got a job with Direct rail Services in Cumbria and found myself living in the real Askam! But there was nowhere to put the layout to store or work on it. In addition by this time I had the first of my very popular Z gauge layouts out on the show circuit and the chances of completing Askam were looking increasingly remote, Sadly the decision was made to sell the completed rolling stock, scrap the baseboards and put the buildings into deep store for a long time. The video part two looks at the work on the shed, signalbox and Co-op and rolling stock [video=youtube_share;BHyFoQiJwTk]http://youtu.be/BHyFoQiJwTk[/video] Recently I have been having a blitz on model railway stuff in store in the house and outbuildings, the first to go were two of my earliest Z gauge layouts which had no bookings for the foreseeable future and they have new homes in Bath and Walney Island respectively and next on the list is Askam. I am going to try and find a new home and future for it somewhere either in a museum or perhaps with a garden railway enthusiast who wants the ultimate centrepiece for his layout. Cheers KEV
fraid so. To be honest I love my Z scale these days but havn't abandoned the big scales all together. I'm still doing the State railways of Thailand in 1nM i.e 1 scale running on 0 scale track. I go back to the big stuff when my eyes go all squirly after putting together some of the more intricate laser cut kits in Z together (like the animek cabooses!) KEV
Eyes. Yup, although I do not go any smaller than N scale, I really understand that. I have been using drug store readers for about twelve or thirteen years now. In fact, for the first time in my life, I just got real prescription glasses on Friday.
