Saturday 16 August 2014

Bromley North: Network SouthEast in OO Gauge

In 2010, I lost a lot of my interest in model railways, sold my large collection and dismantled my layout.  A few years later, after watching BR sectorisation-era videos on YouTube, that interest was rekindled.

So I decided to try building another layout.

The result was Bromley North.  It took a while to build and my interest in model railways came and went many times during construction.  However, it now seems to have stuck for good! 

My criteria that guide layout construction are:
  • London location, run down and trying to escape closure;
  • Generally a Southern Region setting, but not always;
  • Sectorisation period from mid-1980s to early 1990s;
  • Focus on Network SouthEast;
  • Small end-to-end layout with fiddleyard.

In addition to the above, I will only operate with DCC sound and, after previously having a ridiculously large rolling stock collection, I try to limit myself to one of each type of loco and unit.  This isn't always the case; I have two MLVs for example as I always wanted one in Jaffa Cake livery as well as blue/grey.

Bromley North was built with C&L Finescale OO gauge track, the first time I have used something other than Peco.  It looks excellent, especially once painted with Railmatch Sleeper Grime, although it needs to be blended in with Peco points if you don't want to build your own.  I also used point motors for the first time, cobalt ones from DCC concepts.



The layout has now largely been dismantled as I had done everything I wanted to with it.  I am publishing my best pictures and some videos here as a record of a layout that I'm very pleased with. 


The pictures themselves also represent a developing interest in photography of model railways to produce a realistic-looking image.  They are taken with a basic camera (Fujifilm Finepix AV10) and have been edited in Adobe Photoshop Elements 8.

Parts of the layout have been kept and I intend to rebuild them as a layout based on Highgate Wood Sidings in north London, again set in the sectorisation era.  Eventually, I hope to build a model of Addiscombe, with a focus on the lovely Southern Region shed building.

Please browse through the tabs above for a history of the layout, various pictures and a link to my YouTube site with captioned videos of the layout in action.  Clicking on individual pictures will bring up a larger version of each.