L&YR signalling training layout

I remember seeing a newsreel film of this layout many (many) years ago. So pleased they have preserved it. It's well worth a watch if you have a spare twenty minutes.


Rik
sig_school_model_1983.jpg
Thought I'd post my Avatar piccy again, as it's kind of appropriate. In 1983 I spent many evenings, resurrecting the 1930s training railway (Bassett Lowke locos and stock, real signalling equipment), which had once been at Longmoor and was by then in West Germany, but not in working order. Sadly most of it was spirited away when the Army abandoned railway operating a couple of decades later and souvenirs were being claimed.
 
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Thought I'd post my Avatar piccy again, as it's kind of appropriate. In 1983 I spent many evenings, resurrecting the 1930s training railway (Bassett Lowke locos and stock, real signalling equipment), which had once been at Longmoor and was by then in West Germany, but not in working order. Sadly most of it was spirited away when the Army abandoned railway operating a couple of decades later and souvenirs were being claimed.
I was going to mention the Longmoor version - I hadn't realised that it went out to Germany. I have a piccy in the Middleton Press book :nod:

EDIT - I lied. The MP book Branch Lines to Longmoor doesn't have a piccy - so where did I see it?
 
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I visited the LnY layout when it was in situ at Manchester Victoris, bery interesting and still in use around 1990. It got moved to the NRM in the small exhibits rooms and so far as I am aware is still there and used for demonsterations on a regular basis.
 
In 1988, as part of our driver training course (MP12) we where lucky enough to visit and operate it at Man Vic, we did the driving for some trainee signallers, by then the trains were 2 two coach EMUs controlled by ex DMU (Blue Square) power handles. One of those days when you wish you'd taken a camera :rolleyes:
 
The most practical way of doing things I assume. I imagine now there's just a room with a computer
Not so well not quite, I gather there is/was a 00 layout in a training school at Basingstoke. I was approached sometime not long before I moved from Hemel in 2012 about a training railway at Norwood training school for South Central. I did a few visits as a Consultant/potential builder of the line. What they wanted was an ability to help trainees understand 4 aspect signalling with a viewable demonstration with a model train passing signals and changing. I found it was a bit beyond my ability to achieve that but there was a relatively local model railway co that could. Contact was made and an indicative price proved not just a few quid more than the client was willing or able to justify but many thousands too much. Thus the project stalled. It would be so much simpler today with many potential oroducts in the market, 12 years is a long time in model railway tech.
 
This was it (or part of it) in the North Shed of the NRM last Tuesday!
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Definitely purpose built. At first glance I thought maybe it was the top port of a grand piano, but upon more glances, I can see that it was not some old dining room table, repurposed as a train platform.
 
Definitely purpose built. At first glance I thought maybe it was the top port of a grand piano, but upon more glances, I can see that it was not some old dining room table, repurposed as a train platform.
No, it's a pukka one-off job. Many large companies had their own joinery shops, making office and station furniture to ferociously high standards: do it well, do it once. Which is probably why it is still performing so well today. A few sheets of chipboard wouldn't have lasted...
 
No, it's a pukka one-off job. Many large companies had their own joinery shops, making office and station furniture to ferociously high standards: do it well, do it once. Which is probably why it is still performing so well today. A few sheets of chipboard wouldn't have lasted...
Indeed so, Carriage and Wagon works were very capable of making superb wooden items for whatever need.
 
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