Monday 17 September 2018

Modeller Motivated Mutterings (1)

Post Harvest Festival
For those following the exciting life of fbb and his lovely Mrs, the Church Service went very well  yesterday (with a few technological bludners by himself!) with a congregation three time the rather weak "normal". The lunch for two dozen suddenly burgeoned into lunch for 34 (or was it 32), fortunately with adequate reserves of nosh.

But two days hard work meant that a long snooze "happened" during a Sunday afternoon repeat repeat of a Columbo repeat, which rejuvenated the old boy enough to compose today's blog. It was the current edition of Railway Modeller that stimulated the "leedle grey cells".

Euxton Excellence?
The general view is that it is pronounced "EX-ton", but fbb remembers (thinks he remembers?) meeting a local who said it was "UX-ton". It sits serenely south of Preston.
The station at Balshaw Lane and Euxton ...
... closed in 1969 but reappeared Phoenix-like in 1997. now named Euxton Balshaw Lane; probably because it is located on Balshaw Lane at Euxton. Clever eh?
It lacks the character of its predecessor ...
... with entrances from the road leading down lengthy ramps and shallow steps to the platforms.
The facilities consist of bus shelters ...
  ... and four exposed metal seats located, helpfully, outside the shelter.
It boasts (?) an hourly service of trains from Blackpool to Liverpool.
The station is unstaffed and has no facilities for buying tickets.

But, despite this lack of interest, a group of chaps who belong to the Preston and District Model Railway Society have built a model including this "halt".

When fbb was a lad, most model railway enthusiasts built models of stations, real or imaginary, but there is a growing trend to make your model more representative of the main line. It may not even have a station at all.
 Balshaw Lane OO scale station is as incidental to the model main line as the real thing is to the busy electrified West Coast main line.

The station is a tad south of the junction which takes trains from Preston to Bolton and Manchester.
The layout is called "Euxton Junction" as is the junction itself.

The first station (not in the model) round the bend is Buckshaw Parkway ...
... a much more substantial edifice than Balshaw Lane. But it, too, is a phoenix station. It was built on the site of the Royal Ordnance Factory (ROF Chorley) station ...
... and serves the Buckshaw Village development, which replaces the former munitions works.
The old station buildings survived until demolition in 2011 and were something of a mystery to train travellers (which included fbb at times) as they made their way between Manchester and Preston. Nothing stopped there yet it still remained, large and spooky!

Buckshaw "village" is pretty much what you would expect.
But back to the model.

Most OO gauge depictions of real places have to be compressed because the real railway is long, thin and big.

Length is thus drastically shortened; but one feature of real life that is retained in part is where the tracks cross the A49 Wigan Road.
The road wiggles dramatically and the bridge is narrow and low ...
... with traffic light control. Here is the model's version ...
...  although no bus routes run that way, according to Google Streetview.

The defunct operator Fishwick did run a Leyland Lynx ...
... and it did have a service 111, but not, fbb thinks, via the Wigan Road wiggle!

Stagecoach 109 and 109A (Preston, Leyland, Chorley will allow you to explore the delights of the area by bus.
Stagecoach now operates the 111.

But never mind, eh? The model is superb and features on the front cover of the October issue of Railway Modeller.
Yet another beautiful model which makes fbb snivel in disappointment at his pathetic modelling efforts.

Tomorrow we return to Switzerland, leaving a few more "Modeller Mutterings" to fill blogging emptiness as the fbb's set off on their jolly holiday in Morar in a few days.

 Next Geneva blog : Tuesday 18th September 

5 comments:

  1. Fishwicks and Ribble ran the 109 under the bridge for many years. It was relatively recently diverted via Buckshaw.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Of all the model railway titles on the newsstand, good old "RM" is still the one which most appeals to me. Even if the "40 years ago..." feature in the current issue is from about the earliest RM I bought.

    Yikes - 40 years!

    ReplyDelete
  3. Locals (and I used to be one) pronounce it Ex-ton; yet on a flying visit to my native heath last month, I was astonished to hear the lady announcer at Preston station refer to it as Yukes-ton, on two days in a row, as well. (I am not anonymous, but the blog prog doesn't let me be... Jon Blake).

    ReplyDelete
  4. "Technological blushes" in a church service ... Two or three years ago I was leading an all-age Harvest service with lots of images and all the words on a screen at the front. Two-thirds of the way through, the computer died completely and we couldn't restart it. Cue rush to vestry to raoidly photocopy last 2 hymns! We later discovered that the mains extension cable was faulty which meant that the computer was running off its battery which had gone flat. Who'd have thought it? - and highly annoying!

    ReplyDelete
  5. My octogenarian father in law has lived pretty much all his life within five miles of Euxton and pronounces it Exton. Looks like a stunning model

    ReplyDelete