Way back in 2011, Winchester Railway Modellers had an influx of new members and we decided to start something new to develop skills and harness existing knowledge. We figured we could shoehorn a small end-to-end layout into our already crowded club rooms. The team started to bat around ideas and realised the existing large OO gauge layout wasn’t serving our needs and was never likely to get to exhibition standard. It was time to move it on and reuse the space. Time to 'go large' with our plans.
Several proposals for locations and eras were put forward by members and we had more than enough ideas. A few of the members had been perusing the Quail maps of the southern region and came across some oddball track formations at Redbridge at the northern end of Southampton Water. At the same time, we came across the book Making Tracks by J.R.Fairman, which detailed the history of the sleeper works at Redbridge. The seeds of an idea for a layout were planted.
Decisions, decisions
We knew what we wanted from the new layout: it had to work as a club layout
