The Elizabethan Railway Society Exhibition

Pre-grouping through station serving two branch lines. If the Kendal and Windermere Railway company had fulfilled their plans, then Ambleside would have been a junction between Keswick and Penrith.

This layout is the result of the purchase of an old and tired layout by one of our members. We have

put in many hours of work to get it to this point and although it is still an ongoing project we decided

it had progressed far enough to exhibit it in this year's show.

The layout is based on a fictional location in the eastern part of the Baltic Sea now part of Poland. The structures on the layout are mainly modelled on Koenigsberg in the former East Prussia area. The trains are a mixture of KPEV and DRG and are reflecting prototypes seen in the area.

The station was engineered by John Fowler of Forth Railway bridge fame and was opened in 1851 replacing an earlier station in Sheffield. Fowler's design included a 40 ft high viaduct over the Wicker with an impressive arched bridge which remains today. The station roof was originally a large glass overall roof, which was dismantled after WW2 bomb damage rendered it unsafe. After the war the line was electrified (1500 v DC) and had through services onto the Great Central extension to London with named expresses Eg. The Master Cutler, The South Yorkshireman. The Beeching report condemned the GC and Sheffield Victoria into history closing in 1970 to passengers.

Burgedorf is a small station on a typical narrow-gauge branch line in the West Austrian Tyrol. The layout gives a small taste of the fascinating railways in this beautiful Alpine region, especially the Zillertalbahn which formed its inspiration.

Elmfield is a small town in North Worcestershire on the edge of the Black country. The model depicts the station amd exchange sidings in the early 1960's before the Beeching axe removed the passenger services in 1964.

Oscarton station is a four platform terminus served exclusively by DMUs, and has working colour light signals positioned at the platform ends. The track plan comprises two interwoven shuttle lines - one automatic and the other manually controlled.

Brassingdale is a fictitious location somewhere between Brassington and Wirksworth in Derbyshire. Set in the mid thirties, the town has grown from a small hamlet serving the local limestone quarries to a large town with its own station. The two main lines on the embankment represent one of the many lines crossing the dales and serving larger towns like Buxton.

Norman Colliery was born out of a need to have somewhere to shove wagons about with my growing collection of early design diesel shunters. The baseboards where originally mad for a OO continuous run 12' x 8' layout that never materalised. They were converted to a | 16' x 2' scenic layout with a 72' exchange yard. The premise is that the colliery is at the end of its life with the lower screens closing down and only the top screens in use. The only problem is that feeder road to the upper screens has been closed by subsidence so a link line had to be made to the lower line. This gave me the multi-level layout that you do not often see in O gauge. The engines are all kit built from various manufacturers except one 03 from Brassworks. The wagons are all kits, mainly Parkside Dundas with a couple of Slaters and Piercy. The colliery buildings are all scratchbuilt from foamboard with brick and stonework from Slaters and window frames from Highland castings. The track is all Peco, the point motors are from Conrad.