This is my work in (slow) progress. The idea was to fit a mainline through station into the smallest possible space. I chose to model a version of Cyril Freezer's old Minories idea, with some amendments. By making it a through station rather than a terminus I could save a good deal of platform space and make some of the traffic more imaginative, so what we're left with is the station throat, plus extras.
It's set in the north-east midlands somewhere on the old MR in the steam/diesel transition and will fall to Beeching's axe in the next few years. There's a junction presumed offsite to the east coast main line a few miles away which provides unusual Sunday and diversionary traffic. The near track will be a recently closed branch line that has some engineering movements but is mostly overgrown. It may have the odd enthusiast's special or guard's van trip before the metals are torn up nearer the station, and a Class 20 will provide for what's left of the industry.
The bulk of the mainline traffic consists of diesel multiple passenger units, plus agricultural traffic from the east, coal, parcels, football specials served by steam locos or diesel traction. To the left (south) an arched roof will conceal the 'station' (cassettes holding complete trains) and the right (north) will have a bridge serving a similar purpose (more cassettes).
The main points on my modeller's licence comes from the fact trains, especially goods, would have been longer than I can muster, which will top out at loco + three coaches, or equivalent truck length. About as long as can fit on cassettes in the space available given that the train has to pass to an empty cassette of an equivallent length.
The station will have some traffic terminating here, so a pilot loco (top) is retained to shunt stock off scene north. There'll be a 10mph restriction into the station which is already a bottleneck, so lots of slow movement or stops for signals.
Edit: the points are all large radius to avoid the nose going east and bogies going west look, as far as possible. Acceptable on branches, weird on mainlines. It could be shrunk a lot with small radius points and small wheelbase tank engines. The wider radius will also avoid buffer clashes when I get round to going three link and tenders can be set on the shortest gap.
are they Bachmann?
. I'd calculated the number of teeth that I'd need and cut the blank to give me the correct circumference.
