Gateside & Northbridge

[luckymucklebackit]

Hello everyone and welcome to my obsession, an 00 Gauge Layout, that which is known as Gateside and Northbridge. So where are these fictitious places? The answer is that Gateside (Buchanan Street) is based on the old Buchanan Street Station in Glasgow, with Northbridge representing the Edinburgh end of the layout, there is an intermediate station called Mavisbank which would be somewhere in the Falkirk area. As I made no attempt to create a totally accurate model of any one location I have stuck with these names which also have adorned the two previous incarnations of this layout. The era is c1966, so although the diesels have taken on many of the main workings, steam still survives, particularly at the Gateside end of the layout, the date is flexible as some steam locomotives in my collection were extinct by that date and I want to run them so modeller’s license has been invoked.
The primary function of the layout is to play trains within a reasonably convincing setting and the layout is cunningly designed so that the following services can run
Gateside – Fiddle (North), representing services from Glasgow to Dundee, Perth, Aberdeen etc
Gateside to Northbridge (Shuttle representing Glasgow to Edinburgh workings diverted from Queen Street due to a long term major fault in the tunnel )
Northbridge to Fiddle (South), representing Edinburgh to the south via the East Coast Main Line.

General Schematic Diagram of the Layout

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Sadly the lack of space (and finance) has meant some limitations, I do not particularly like having single track between the stations but this cannot be helped, there is still plenty of operational interest, resulting in a 17 page working timetable that runs over 24 hours involving 275 train movements.
Construction began about 5 years ago and has been steady if occasionally slow, the layout also evolved somewhat as at one point as I considered the original plan over ambitious and for a short while what is now Mavisbank was going to be the end of the line, before I re-routed the branch and ended up with the layout in its current form. Control is old-school DC and Track is PECO code 100 throughout, with PECO point motors used; stock is a mixed bag dating from when I got back into the hobby in the 1980s, so we have quite a few vintage Lima diesels and DMUs augmented by more recently acquired Bachman Steam Locomotives and one Heljan class 17. The older type 2 outline locos are hard wired to run in multiple which does improve performance. I would love to replace the Lima coaches and locomotives with new stuff but I haven’t won the lottery yet.
A journey along the layout:

Fiddle Yard General View

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We start in the six track fiddle yard on a Deltic Hauled northbound ECML express, on one of the three tracks nearest the operator designated “Fiddle South”, (the back three tracks are designated Fiddle North) from here we pass under the approaches to Gateside and briefly run through a deep cutting and a second short tunnel to appear on a stretch of open single track, in hindsight this is one stretch I would have made double track (see comment above) but there wasn’t room to thread it round the roof trusses

In the cutting between the Fiddle Yard and Northbridge

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A further tunnel takes us into Northbridge Station, which has three through platforms and two bays, with goods lines to our right. The station building is elevated over the goods lines and when completed will be based on Haymarket Station in Edinburgh, there is no goods facilities here, goods traffic is assumed to go off down the branch behind the factory. One of my pet hates on many layouts and track plans is to see a sprawling urban passenger station with a disproportionally small goods yard tucked in a corner, most unprototypical, city goods yards were normally bigger than the corresponding passenger station!

Entering Platform 1 of Northbridge from the East

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Drawing up in Platform 1 at Northbridge, a Brush Type 4 waits to take us on to Gateside

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Here the Deltic comes off to be replaced by a Brush type 4 which on departure hauls us past a small factory and locomotive storage sidings to our right, and carriage sidings to our left. We enter a tunnel and appear in a familiar deep cutting but on a different track, the route from Fiddle (North) trails in from the left at this point and there is a crossover back to the route previously followed to allow continuous running for test purposes. Yet another short tunnel is ahead, and beyond that we enter Mavisbank station, which has been an early candidate for rationalisation and resignalling, being the only part of the layout with colour light signals.

Mavisbank has three platforms, all bi-directional, a small locomotive depot and some sidings, here some local services terminate and also portions from Northbridge and Gateside are split/combined for workings to Fiddle North. Leaving Mavisbank we climb behind the backscene to emerge on a series of bridges and embankments over the Northbridge approaches and enter one final tunnel that takes us into Gateside Station, the goods station in the corner is based on Glasgow’s High Street Goods (attempting to look big to avoid my pet hate - See above), the locomotive depot (kitbashed Dapol) was inspired by Kipps depot in Coatbridge and the Station, station, signals and signal box are based on a scaled down Glasgow Buchanan street. This is journeys end and our Brush type 4 uncouples and an English Electric Type 4 reversed onto the other end ready to return to Northbridge.



The Scottish region is perfect for timetable modelling, as five to six coach trains are not short of what was the normal, and there was a great selection of locomotives to be seen (Buchanan Street, being close to St Rollox Works was especially varied) , so far the layout is about 80% complete with only a few major bits still to be done, however my skills are still developing and Andrew’s fabulous Edinburgh based layout has inspired me to revisit some of the proprietary patch ups and think about something more realistic, so I will keep you up-to –date with developments.

Hope you enjoy.

Jim

[luckymucklebackit]

Some more photographs

[luckymucklebackit]

Last lot for now

[thebritfarmer]

What a great layout !! You have some great buildings as well. I particularly like the building that has a hip style roof and also what I would guess it the main station. Are these kits or scratch builds.?
Either way nicely done ! Looking forward to seeing more.


Regards
Scott

[manna]

G'Day Gents

Very convincing, an awful lot of hard work has paid off, excellent

manna

[luckymucklebackit]

Thanks for the kind comments guys, to answer Scott's questions about the buildings, they are of various sources, a lot of the original buildings were Superquick, which I found were as the brand suggests, quick to assemble, but not very prototypical for a Scottish Based Layout. I then discovered the excellent Scalescenes range of kits and building papers and this is the source for the warehouse at Mavisbank and most of the retaining walls - hooray for random ashlar!! I took this a stage further for the buildings at Gateside, when I discovered that you can take these kits (supplied as pdf files) and do screen captures, These can then be manipulated to form the building you want without a lot of the cutting and pasting . The goods shed and station building at Gateside were built using this as a basis. My latest building was the signal box at Gateside which is currently my pride and joy, my firat totally scratchbuilt building and I am very pleased with it. As I mentioned I am mightlly impressed by Andrew's Leith Baltic Street and I have identified some areas of my layout where I will try out some more scratchbuilding.
The semaphore signals are all Ratio kits, but as I have been building these kits for a number of years I have found a few ways to improve these, all the pivot points are drilled out to accept a dressmakers pin, this is then snipped to length. Doing this allows the spare wire to be used as handrails, again the uprights are the same dressmakers pins superglued into place on the access platform.

Cheers

JIm

[Ex-Pat]

I particularly like the backscene on the "Northbridge Station Building under construction" photo and the way the road surface changes at the white lines of the junction.

Is it part of a commercially available range, or custom-made?

[Terrier]

Nice and busy! ...and big! i like it.

[thebritfarmer]

Thanks for the explanation Jim.

[luckymucklebackit]

I particularly like the backscene on the "Northbridge Station Building under construction" photo and the way the road surface changes at the white lines of the junction.

Is it part of a commercially available range, or custom-made?

Hi - The road surface is from the Scalescenes range - I cannot praise this guy enough, he has a wonderful range of kits and building papers (I do not have any commercial association with the site;-)). http://www.scalescenes.com/. The kit can be found here - http://www.scalescenes.com/products/T03 ... -Pavements. The backscene is a photograph I took of the lower end of the Royal Mile in Edinburgh, it is not strictly prototypical as there is a bus stop which is clearly curret pattern - I had to wait for ages to take the photograph with no road vehicles in shot which would have blown the era completely. On the Gateside end of the layout I have used the idea of blown up pictures of actual scenes from 1960s Glasgow, sourcing pictures from websites such as Urban Glasgow. Will post a couple of pictures to show this effect shortly. I would like to expand this idea as it does give the layout an individuality that commercially produced backscenes do not, I hate the Peco backscene behind Northbridge Station, it was a "quick fix" at the time and is an early candidate for re-wallpapering!

Thanks once again for the kind comments everyone - praise where due and constructive criticism is what these sites are about , I am sure that you will agree that there is nothing worse than taking the time to post stuff and find it drift down the listing without comment.

Jim

[Ex-Pat]

On the Gateside end of the layout I have used the idea of blown up pictures of actual scenes from 1960s Glasgow, sourcing pictures from websites such as Urban Glasgow. Will post a couple of pictures to show this effect shortly.

I look forward to these - there is an interesting short thread on this subject ("Why? Why? Why?" on 3rd July 2011 on page 2 of General Model Railway Discussion).

Whilst the acquisition of hardware/software etc. to accomplish this is relatively easy (funds permitting!), the knowledge to successfully operate them is certainly lacking. I'm crying out for an Idiot's Guide on how to produce Backscenes from photographs, so any simple explanations as to how you went about it would be most welcome please.

[luckymucklebackit]

OK - Backscene printing for beginners!!

First of all, the most difficult part, if you are a period modeller, is getting suitable subject matter. Luckily for me there are several sites with suitable 1960s Era photographs such as http://www.hiddenglasgow.com/forums/ and http://urbanglasgow.co.uk. Once you have hunted down and selected suitable photographs they can be manipulated into something usable. I do not have anything expensive like Photoshop etc, everything I have done has been using Microsoft Paint and Microsoft Photo Editor, it takes longer but the end result is the same and it is free. My only advice is to give it a go and see what comes up on the screen, when you think you have something good print it off. Don't be afraid to enlarge things, the loss of resolution on a backscene is usually not noticable.

The Glasgow Scenes are on these photographs

http://www.jhowie.force9.co.uk/models/layout%20004.jpg

These road scenes were taken from photographs on Urban Glasgow and were carefully cropped on Paint and pasted onto a common sky backscene, these were then blended around low relief buildings such as the flats (which were a free Scalescenes kit in a Magazine). I am lucky in having access to a colour laser printer which can give good results (what the boss doen't know...)

http://www.jhowie.force9.co.uk/models/layout%20058.jpg

This is a photograph from Flickr that I was desperate to have due to the presence of Pinkston Power Station and one of the guys on Urban Glasgow got me a copy, don't know what software he used to grab it. I also have Screenhunter free screen grab software that works well. This particular scene is used twice, with the left hand view being the original photo and the right hand section a mirrored image carefully avoiding the main features (you can see the join). The big flats was then used as a scenic break, being printed from another photograph and pasted on top.

Jim

[Ex-Pat]

Much obliged to you Jim for this. I'll certainly be giving it a go in due course.

[luckymucklebackit]

.Hi all - sorry for delay in posting again, I kept meaning to do it but when I went to take the supporting photographs it was a case of "no, thats not right yet" followed by some more modelling.

Concentrating on Gateside (Buchanan Street) Station Building on this post, I have borrowed some photographs to help illustrate the prototype that I have been trying to capture, albeit in truncated form

The station Frontage


The Real Thing


Looking from the entrance to the platform back towards the booking office



And the real thing



The station Departure board



And the real thing


Jim

[luckymucklebackit]

Couple more

Looking down from above


Looking towards the bufferstops


The same view with the canopies removed, note the locating pegs for the legs, to allow easy removal for track cleaning and accurate replacement. Also spot the deliberate mistake - 100 lines, I must remember to paint the other side of the girder before adhering the glazing!!




Jim