With the impending Stamford show date closing rapidly, the pace quickened somewhat on the Cranwell layout during April. In keeping with the clocks going forward to British Summer Time colour began to appear on the layout..
Spring is sprung, The grass is ris, I wonder where the buildings is?
That appaling ode to model making brings us nicely onto the fact that roads were given a final coat of grey emulsion tarmac, the scenic scatter was laid, and the behemoths that are the n-gauge hangars glued in situ. They have been closely followed by the station area and various buildings across the establishment.
Each one of those buildings has had to be researched from the RAF College Library aerial photgraphs and then designed and constructed from foamboard, card and scalescenes building sheets. It has not been an easy ticket.
Whilst the scenery has been going down, so have the electrics. Unfortunately the wiring, which was working, had received a visit from the gremlins and had started throwing a short circuit. This was eventually traced and rectified but it certainly caused a bit of a ‘sense of humour failure’.
With 1 week remaining to the Market Deeping MRC show at Stamford Welland Academy on 9/10th May we have the last few buildings to wrap and glue down, some heatshrink to apply to limit gremlin activity and a final track clean before buttoning it all up for the journey down the A15.
One last thing to remember about this layout. It is all scratch built – no RTR (apart from the pannier locos while our Manning Wardles are being developed by 55th Studio), all research is carried out from 1 book and that shares the same source of information, namely the photographic evidence and JARIC 1922 model all within the RAF Cranwell college library. We’ve only met 2 people with memory of the location and that is from the 1950s, which proved the track across the road was ungated and the working of the coal wagons. When you see it, if you don’t think it is correct please don’t go full ‘rivet counter’ as we’ll simply ask you to prove your evidence. But we’ll happily change stuff if you do have better evidence than the RAF about their railway.
Thanks for following the journey. The next update will be following the layout’s exhibition at Stamford.