A quick summary of what has happened so far, and apoogies to those of you who have read much of this before on RMweb and elsewhere, but there will be updates here that have not appeared elsewhere.
Slattocks Junction has already been a long time in the making, as suggested above, but we had got to the stage where all the trackwork was finished and ballasted and virtually all the basic scenery had been designed and assembled, but not necessarily fixed to the layout. It attended Scalefour North in 2004, in bare baseboard state, with some of the trackwork not in use. This proved to be very useful and we had hoped attending this show would give us the impetus to finish the layout relatively quickly. Time past but after a few fits and starts the layout ended up looking like this.
- The 'old' Slattocks
- ' Slattocks.jpg (378.5 KiB) Viewed 12478 times
- ' Slattocks 2.jpg (310.93 KiB) Viewed 12478 times
One of the next stages was to do a final paint of all the trackwork, and as has been previously documented, this proved to be the biggest problem of the lot. Slattocks had been laid with C&L track which had been bought at a time when the then owner of the company had been experimenting with various types of plastic. Our track bases turned out to be polypropylene, which, we all now know, does not take paint without using some chemical process, which we understand would have prevented the use of Dean Hall for the next 200 years!! Given that the track was still in need of some proper fettling the group had a massive decision to make. Do we fettle the track but be forced to repaint at least some of the sleepers every time we took it to a show, or did we take the bull by the horns and rip the whole lot up. After much discussion and heartache a decision was made. The following photo's explain it all, and yes, there was something quite therapeutic about the whole process.
- The track demolition gang 1.jpg (110.05 KiB) Viewed 12478 times
- Shades of the 60's
- 's.jpg (60.52 KiB) Viewed 12478 times
- The last remaining bit of track
- The last remaining bit of track.jpg (83.37 KiB) Viewed 12478 times
So we were left with a layout that had already taken an age to build which now had no track on the scenic part of it! We had intended to simply relay the track to the same design and a materials list had been prepared and some parts purchased. However, around this time Dick Petter came along and drew up a revised track plan. Having worked on the layout for some considerable time most of the group were already of the mindset that no alteration should take place but it didn't exactly take too long to realise that Dicks revision gave a much more realistic focus to the layout and offered significantly greater operating potential. So having taken the bold/foolish (delete as appropriate) decision to remove several years of hard work, and still feeling a little shell-shocked about the whole situation, we found ourselves with a revised trackplan which we were very happy with which ticked a number of boxes from the outset. Since then some of the group have been beavering away looking at service patterns on the Manchester Rochdale line and identifying how these could be interpreted on the layout.
The revised plan was drawn out in Templot by Andy Goodman although much of the geometry of the non standard pointwork has been hand drawn by Dick. He was adamant that this pointwork should be of ply and rivet construction and offered to build it himself but because the group had already commited itself to using full height sleepers and track using P4 Track Company components for the plain track a certain amount of readjustment of the ballast bed under the pointwork will be necessary to maintain rail height.
When we first started ballasting Slattocks I was still in short pants, so where possible we are now adopting Dick's method of ballasting as the track is laid. This should save us hours and hours and hours and hours and....... ! The first section of plain track has now been laid and I personally think it is a marked improvement on our last effort. Sorry about the depth of field in one of the photo's, the lighting in Dean Hall isn't bright enough for such close up's.
- Dick lays the first track.jpg (93.98 KiB) Viewed 12478 times
- Track laying begins.jpg (77.35 KiB) Viewed 12478 times
- Track laying begins 2.jpg (76.59 KiB) Viewed 12478 times
And shortly to be fixed in place will be the junction itself. On the prototype this junction forms one side of the Castleton triangle and now this is a proper feature of the layout it opens up the possibilities for some very interesting stock movements.
- Slattocks Junction itself.jpg (93.46 KiB) Viewed 12478 times
And thats about it for now. Hopefully, we should now be able to report progress on a more regular basis. There are still one or two big decisions to be made but, hopefully, all will be made to improve the layout for when it hits the road.
Tony
