HOOK BASIN

FACTFILE

Layout name: Hook Basin

Scale/Gauge: 1:25 scale/16.5mm track/18in gauge

Size: 8ft 6in by 1ft 6in

Era/Region: Early 1930s, North Oxfordshire

Layout type: Scenic Terminus to Fiddle Yard

Wind the clock back some 14 years, and picture in your mind two railway modellers, sitting waiting for a train on the way back from an exhibition, discussing the design of a freelance locomotive one of them had built. My friend had extended the proprietary chassis slightly to fit the body, but we then mused if the same type of chassis could be used without modification. A sketch was produced of the shortened locomotive, and, to the builder’s amazement, it ‘worked’. The drawing was handed to me with the comment, “Well, you’d better build it, then”.

The locomotive turned out a few weeks later as ‘Hook and Morton Tramway Loco No. 2’, although it’s affectionately known as Tyro. It was my first foray into scratchbuilding, and the start of ‘Hook Basin’.

First steps

Tyro needed somewhere to run, and being in the slightly esoteric scale of 1:25, meant building most things from scratch. 1:25 scale has some advantages, especially when combined with the idea of 15in or 18in gauge stock, which is what was, in part, driving the idea.

It’s 12mm:1ft scale, or ‘1mm:1in’, which is useful for ‘measurement of eye’. 16.5mm track could be used as ‘close enough’ scale, and this