Mainlines in Modest Spaces

Mainlines in Modest Spaces
Iain Rice
Atlantic Publishers
96pp

This is the sequel to the same author's "Designs for Urban Layouts".

This volume defines a 'modest space' as anything from a spare room to a single garage, and a 'main line' as a extreme provincial end of a route or secondary cross country line, giving as examples the Cornish main line, the Somerset and Dorset, or the Newcastle to Carlisle line, rather than four track sections of the West Coast Main Line.

The first four chapters are taken up with the philosophy of main line modelling, and the practicalities of building them in a limited space, with discussion of curvatures, train lengths and choice of gauge and scale. Sadly he concludes than 7mm is a non-starter; you can't get "O Gauge", "Main Line" and "Modest Space" in the same sentence.

Then we get fourteen complete layout plans for different scales and eras. Unlike the previous book in the series, this time the diesel era manages to gets a look in, with two of the fourteen plans set specifically in the post-steam era. Significantly both of these are in N gauge, while all but one of the steam era layouts are 4mm.

There's a lot of emphasis on fiddle yard design in order to accommodate decent length trains in a limited space. Only a couple of designs use the traditional 'oval with storage loops' format. Instead, the author comes up with a variety of different ideas including vertical traversers and cassettes. Several plans feature steep gradients on the scenic parts leading to stacked fiddle yards, sometimes with an equally steep linking road to allow continuous running. Of course, we also see one of his famous "teardrop" style plans, with a steeply graded mainline in a teardrop shape fed by two fiddle yards, one above the other.

One things that strikes me is the relatively limited capacity of many of the plans. With a six road traverser or a pair of three or four road dead end fiddle yards, they only have space for half a dozen trains in a typical operating session.

Every one of these plans, just as in the earlier planbook, is set in a specific time and place. Some are based on actual locations, such as Luxulyan, Bodmin Road and Yeoford, while others are fictitious locations on prototype routes such as the Midland line through the Derbyshire peaks or the L&Y in Lancashire. The whole book is peppered with autobiographical asides. He tells us about trainspotting at Bodmin Road during family summer holidays in Cornwall with his packed lunch ("The up 'Cornish Riviera' used to appear at about sandwich-opening time"), and of his last sad sighting of an A4 pacific, filthy and battered hauling a humble pick up goods on the now closed Waverley route in Scotland.

Overall, while not specifically aimed at the diesel era modeller, there's a lot of food for thought and inspiration in these pages. And the prototypicality of the plans is a far cry from the train set curves and cover-the-entire-board-with-track approach I remember from those Peco planbooks written by Cyril Freezer in the sixties and seventies.