TETBURY

FACTFILE

Layout name: Tetbury

Scale/Gauge: 4mm:1ft scale / 16.5mm gauge / OO Size: 15ft x 3ft

Era/Region: 1950s BR/Western Region

Layout type: Fiddleyard to terminus

The beauty of modelling a real location is that the design is all done for you. All you’ve got to do is follow a photograph. While that sounds simple, it also creates challenges.

I tried looking at various stations, but one by one they failed to get me excited. Either they were too big and required too much compression, or they had been modelled before, or were just flat and boring. I soon found that Tetbury looked very different. Its steeply-sided slopes chiselled out of the Cotswold hills really caught my eye. Furthermore, the site had been saved from development, and thankfully, the goods shed still stands today. This allowed me to visit the site and measure key details that you simply cannot get from studying a book.

I was returning from a training event in Bristol when I paid Tetbury a visit. I wanted to check the course of ‘the splash’ – the affectionate name for the stream running beside the station building. When I arrived, it had run dry, letting me take measurements, but I did get some odd looks walking along a dried-up river