Return of the Nose

After too long a silence, Electric Nose is back. His most recent post commemorates the 50th anniversary of Cyril Freezer's Minories.

I wouldn't presume to second-guess Cyril's original intentions, but, whether by accident or design, for my money one of the most significant factors that has made Minories consistently attractive over five decades is it's do-ability. It's buildable by anyone, regardless of scale or gauge. It'll work with everything from set-track upwards, and uses standard pointwork cleverly, arranged in such a way that dog-legs and reverse-curves are minimised. All too frequently, published track plans show flowing pointwork on sweeping curves, artistic license painting an idyllic picture that, whilst prototypical, just isn't attainable when you start nailing the savage corners of commercial trackwork to your baseboard. In a hobby where 99.99% of plans seem to be aimed at the 0.01% who think hand-building track is a worthwhile use of their leisure time, Minories stays with the mainstream. The sharper than scale bends inherent in commercial pointwork are masked as much as possible by using them where a train needs to turn a fairly sharp corner anway. The design works with these limitations, using them as features rather than obstacles.

Cyril Freezer's plans get a lot of stick, and many of them look cramped and rather toy-like compared with the more recent designs from the likes of Iain Rice. But I was greatly inspired in my teenage years by the likes of "60 plans for small layouts" and "Plans for Larger Layouts" published by Peco Publications in the 1960s. I think a lot of his smaller ones would actually work very well in N if you built them to the same physical area as his 00 plans, with adjustments for track centres. Then his 3-4 coach trains become 6-8 coaches, and visible 18" curves don't look quite so horrible.

Saying that, I've never tried to build anything based on a CJF trackplan. All my British outline N gauge layouts have been attempts to reproduce prototypes.

BTW, I've always thought that Cyril Freezer is to model railways what E Gary Gygax is to roleplaying. And I have (briefly) met both of them.