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Restoration And Extension

3 Warley 2011 and Aylesbury 2012

While carrying out the essential repairs and restoration to prepare the layout for exhibition at Warley, our thoughts turned to how it could be developed into a through station and to give credence to its supposed Salford location. Windsor Bridge to Castlefield seemed a fairly obvious choice and our preliminary ideas were displayed on a drawing at Warley.

Since the upper level tracks into the station had no traverser, operation of passenger trains was very restricted without unacceptable handling of locomotives and stock, a situation which reinforced our decision in favour of a through station.

On the low level track, a double track traverser was supplied by three tracks on the scenic section, leaving one of them unguarded. After narrowly avoiding running an engine off it onto the floor, "wings" were attached, so that all tracks were guarded, in time for the Aylesbury exhibition.

At other end, the single track "fiddle board" was found to have insufficient clearance for most engines to use it without fouling the screen that hid it from public view. Furthermore, because it was some distance from the operator and partially obscured by the Inkerman Street shops, occasionally an engine down there was overlooked until it was found to be trying to push the end stop away. A switched isolating section was installed for Aylesbury while the fiddle board was widened to solve the clearance problem.

During the Warley 2011 exhibition, consideration was given to rebuilding the entire layout and the proposed extension to Scale 7 standards. Although the suggestion had merit, when it was realised that four of the six active members of the group had between them extensive collections of suitable stock to 'O' Fine standards, while the remaining two had little, if any, LMS stock to Scale 7 standards, the proposal was deemed impractical.

At the Aylesbury exhibition, it was realised that the baseboards were no longer stable and extensive filling of the interboard gaps was again necessary. Furthermore, the scissors crossover on the upper level began to feature in derailments, when it had been trouble free at Warley. As it was superfluous for a though station, it was to have been converted to a trailing crossover but, in the light of experience, the decision was taken to build a completely new set of baseboards in more stable form, the design of which was entrusted to George Godfrey, pending production of the final approved track plan.

A small scale diagram of the proposed track plan with alternatives was tabled and discussed during the Aylesbury exhibition. With approval in principle, an action was then placed for detailed scale track drawings to be prepared. These, together with the suggested layout of various buildings, all to ⅕th model scale, were completed and discussed at the Morecambe meeting of the LMS Society in October 2012 when, subject to some minor amendments, they were approved.