I forgot to reply to this and I’m at work at the moment so I’ll do it properly later but I like some of ideas you’ve had. Have you had any more thoughts on it?
Thanks for putting a message here - it's almost as if you knew I had some updates to share...
Are we all sitting comfortably? Good - this is going to be a long one...
When moving various buildings around the layout the other day - particularly the depot buildings - I noticed that there was the possibility that Oldmoor town centre could be expanded to have two roads instead of just the one. I was quite taken by this idea and so I've spent the last few days trying to work out a way of getting more scenery into the town centre.
The first step was to move the depot buildings away from Oldmoor Junction station. This would allow for scenery to take over that area. My initial idea was to move the depot over to where Oldmoor-on-Sea used to be (as in the previous update): however, this idea fell apart when I realised that having the depot over there would, whilst nice, would be a bit impractical and would need quite a bit of reworking to be done to the buildings I'd made.
So now the first step has become a lot harder. To add to the issue, I'd decided that I didn't want to get rid of a station in the Oldmoor-on-Sea area - meaning another idea I'd had, whereby the depot would move to where the railway centre was, and the railway centre would move to where Oldmoor-on-Sea was, wouldn't work. I'm sure you can see what a pain this has been!
One thing which made life a bit easier was changing the trackplan of the railway centre. I'd decided I wasn't overly happy with the strange track layout, and after a visit to Banbury station at the weekend, I wanted to include some sort of depot with sidings long enough for storing a small rake of coaches (or a normal-length train, i.e. four/five carriages, split up over multiple sidings). Changing the railway centre trackplan to have four long sidings made this possible, and here's the result:
As you can see, the depot has been moved back to where it used to be before it was swapped around with the railway centre. As the caption in the photo says, the depot should be able to hold around twelve engines if there aren't any units in the sidings, which is a step up from the depot as it was by Oldmoor Junction station. I've decided to not use the longer of the two depot buildings, as it's too long and covers too much of the track - a lot of depots/stabling points have sidings out in the open, and so I've tried to replicate that here.
You can see the new design of Oldmoor Junction station in this photo too - so let's have a look at that properly.
I'm fairly sure I shared my idea to remove a platform at Oldmoor Junction and replace it with a siding - and here's the result. The end result is a bit different to what I'd planned to begin with, but I'm happy with it. The idea is that having a couple of sidings for coach/engine storage in the station removes the need to have more sidings in the depot (and it also helps to break up the repetition of platforms a bit too).
The siding with the Prairie at the end also serves as the access road to and from the railway centre, which is now located where the depot used to be (but takes up a lot less space). The slightly strange design with the crossover and the junction came about purely so that I could include the crossover piece, which I bought several months ago and didn't want to waste.
This design reminds me of some of the larger terminus stations around the country in the pre-Beeching/modernisation era for some reason - a screenshot of a Train Sim route with an old Reading station on it reminded me of this to an extent as it had lots of carriage sidings at one point.
A potential change I might make before I pin the track down is to connect the Prairie siding to the one on the right, which might allow for the siding to hold coaches when not being used as an access point for the railway centre.
We're almost finished - on to the town centre.
Apologies for the messy state of it all at the moment!
Here you can see the two-road format of the town centre, which I think is a massive improvement over the single-road design I had before. As it says on the photo, the original idea was to put a park in the bit with the static grass bottle, but I'll probably swap the park area with the bit in-between the two roads, if that makes sense, there's one road of shops and then another just running between the railway centre and the park/green space. The main reason for doing this is to remove the problem of having to detail the backs of the shops facing out onto the road - you don't often see that (or at least not in the places near me), so I'm going to try and keep the roads running alongside the shop fronts only.
The railway centre has been reduced down to three sidings, but it looks more like a goods yard than it did before - which is a good thing. I had been trying to work out ways of fitting the goods shed into the railway centre in terms of history, but now it makes sense to say the railway centre was originally a goods yard - hence its proximity to the town centre, and the sidings - and has been preserved with a selection of displayed engines on rotation.
And finally - the end! Here we have what I've done to the old Oldmoor-on-Sea area:
It's a very similar trackplan to that of Oldmoor-on-Sea, but slightly elongated. There's still a kickback siding, and a run-around loop. However, the run-around loop now has the ability to hold two coaches, if a train is being held in platform 1 as the engine runs around it, or a single coach, if the train is being held in platform 2 as the engine runs around. Fairly simple, but more like a standard heritage railway station.
This station is going to be a simple two-platform design, with a single siding. I had tried to fit in a small goods yard to the left of P2, but it wouldn't work with a goods yard
and a station platform. The station will have a footbridge going between the platforms, and will be situated next to a small village green with a small cricket ground. The pieces of cardboard in this area are to mark the dimensions of the Metcalfe pavilion kit, which looks to be perfect for what I'm aiming for with this area. Peco make a set of cricketers - they're £27.50 though:
https://peco-uk.com/products/cricketers
I might just have a set of generic people sat around the place instead
So - that's what I've been getting up to on the layout over the past few days. Do let me know what you think, or if you have any other ideas. There's still quite a bit to be finalised!
Thanks for reading,
-Peter