Author

Lawrence Robbins

Date

27th July 2023

Reading Time

2 minutes

For the third year I (and our treasurer Gus Paul) have had the opportunity to support Pete Waterman, and the Railnuts, installing their latest layout into Chester Cathedral earlier this week.

“Making Tracks 3” is the most complex yet as it features Milton Keynes station with 6 platform faces and a bay. Two of the lines are bi-directional requiring adjustments to the control systems. As well as more large buildings, and all the usual details of a station, the layout features car parks, working signalling. The detailed OLE is tensioned so that the pantographs rest on the wires.

A new feature this year is that each train will trigger destination boards whilst a second board shows the actual traffic through the real station.

At 64 ft the layout is a scale mile in OO, and the limit for the space in the cathedral. However, when the layout appears at GETS in October it will be larger. By utilising all three layouts the length will be 152 ft long and 14 ft wide. With 4 tracks throughout, all equipped with OLE, this will represent 5 scale miles for each circuit. Quite how this will be operated is unclear but as I have been invited to drive it, I’m looking forward to this challenge.

Making Tracks 2 won the BRM Silver award for Layout of the year 2022 (see Award Winning MRC). I took the opportunity to present the award to Pete Waterman in a brief break from the setting up and testing. I can see the full Making Tracks challenging for Gold this year.

If you actually wan to read about how to build model railway tracks – check out these blogs:

Track Building – Part 2

A new home test track