Scalefour Forum

I wonder what happened to the rest of the layout?

Steve

From looking at the sale it sounds to me like he’s still got it. So far though no interest in the four Iain Rice engines, including the famous Yellow Peril. I remember running these at a few shows at the time. Operation was spiced up by the North London Tank running the opposite way to everything else. Which I (and others) never quite got the hang of.

Philip

Well, if nothing else, I reckon this thread will have got the seller very excited by having the number of eBay watchers increase dramatically, and leaving him/her awaiting a last minute frenzy of bidding activity.

Others may know the history, I'm left wondering. Was the recipient given/paid a price for that stock in good faith towards future use, or expectation of sale en masse a few years later for a good few dollars profit?

Lindsay

Apparently they were bought with the intention that they would feature in an attraction/museum which never happened.

I contacted the seller. The layout basically fell apart and the remaining locos and stock went for about £1000. A year or two before he told a few wagons off including an LSWR gunpowder van and the GER van that graced the cover of MRJ No 0. They are safely wrapped up now.

At Missenden over the weekend, one of the visitors brought the mill buildings/complex as a restoration project.

The buildings themselves still captured the character of the original layout really quite well and any damage was, i felt, not a problem - indeed it was not visible at all and given that the buildings were deliberately decrepit additional damage simply became part of the patina of age!

What was clear though was the baseboards were constructed in a somewhat "rustic" style (cue abuse from Paul Willis.........) and I am not altogether surprised there has been some disintegration!

I meant to ask how much else of the layout he might have had. I did pick up that it will be relaid to EM, so the stock was presumably not part of the new proposal.

Mark Tatlow wrote:At Missenden over the weekend, one of the visitors brought the mill buildings/complex as a restoration project.

The buildings themselves still captured the character of the original layout really quite well and any damage was, i felt, not a problem - indeed it was not visible at all and given that the buildings were deliberately decrepit additional damage simply became part of the patina of age!

What was clear though was the baseboards were constructed in a somewhat "rustic" style (cue abuse from Paul Willis.........) and I am not altogether surprised there has been some disintegration!

I meant to ask how much else of the layout he might have had. I did pick up that it will be relaid to EM, so the stock was presumably not part of the new proposal.

I also popped into the "Modelling buildings" tutorial room (led by Jerry Clifford, with some superb examples of 2FS modelling on show) and was pleased to find one of Iain's creations.

Mark is not quite right in what he saw. I was also told that the original East Suffolk Light Railway had literally "fallen apart", although apparently the monumental maltings building still exists. By chance, it had been returned to Bob Barlow for some light repairs to wear and tear before Bob's untimely death, and so had been found in his workshop.I didn't quite catch where it is now.

The layout part that was brought along to be worked on during the weekend is part of Iain's "Butley Mills" confection. You may remember that this was a representation of a 1950s East Anglian "twig off a branch" line ending at an old flour mill with a modern extension to it. The whole looks just as good today as it did when it featured in various magazines - notably MRJ - and as a worked example in various of Iain's later books.

It has indeed been relaid with EM track, or at least this bit, as a start. The other work being done at Missenden was building backs to the buildings, as the intention is that it is now viewed more in the round. The baseboards have also been rebuilt/strengthened, as they were indeed built in a somewhat unusual and haphazard manner. I think that engineering underpinnings are not one of Iain's stronger points!

The couple of photos below show just how lovely a layout it still is, and how much it captures the atmosphere of Suffolk in the middle of the 20th century, at a time of change in many traditions. I believe that the layout's owner will be back to do the Missenden Summer School, so you could always book on that to see it in the flesh...





Cheers
Paul