Croxley Cartographic Considerations
For the moment, fbb will call the whole caboodle "Croxley Park", although various names are used in various places as we shall see. The original development, dating from the 60s (?), is shaped like a slice of cake and consists of a wide range of light industrial units, warehouses and retail.
The estate roads form a lower case "d" with a time point near the bottom of the downstroke.
At some stage (1990s?) an extra layer has been added to the west. This was speculative office blocks all to a similar design wherein people toil at desks and computers.
Hatters Road is a cul-de-sac (with wiggles) ending in a small roundabout where the buses turn to get out again.
The lampposts are not bent due to an unfortunate contretemps with a W30, they have been "designed as a statement" - the statement being, presumably, "hey folks we've got bent lampposts!".
So the W30 bumbles round the older bit, then double runs down the newer bus before setting off back to Watford.
Of course, the planners and developers had no consideration for the practicalities of bus operation (so no surprise there, then) so there is no way through from Caxton Way to Hatters Lane, and no way through by vehicle from Holywell housing estate either. Blackmoor Lane leads to the Paper Mill estate which featured in yesterday's posting.
There is, however, a footpath through to Morrisons from Holywell as seen below with a happy shopper staggering home with good things in bags! Bus route 10 would offer a back way to the store.
Morrisons is even newer than the Hatters Lane office-block estate and has the W18 to serve it officially.
The W18 is not much of a bus route, being an extension of the local service to "North Bushey" ...
... with a paltry three round trips on Saturday.
Note that the W18 uses the old thin Ascot Road ...
... which passes under the former Croxley Green branch ...
... whereas the W30 uses the new dual carriageway Ascot Road which has obliterated a chunk of the former railway infrastructure.
It will need a new mega-bridge and possibly a raising of the embankment. The girder bridge (right) is over the River Gade if ever the Croxley Link is to materialise.
But, back to the W30. After serving the two chunks of Croxley Park, the route takes happy commuters via Watford Met (Underground) station ...
... which was never the intended terminus of the line. The Metropolitan Railway Company even built their terminus on Watford High Street ...
... (now Wetherspoons - who else!) but never built the track.
Undaunted, our W30 no performs a huge gyration to serve Watford Junction station ...
... and on to its town centre "terminus" in Market Street.
For Watford residents, the town centre "circle" is pretty standard and they understand it contentedly, but, for a newcomer it is a bit baffling - even more so if you are on foot!
An enlargement of the line of route map would help if you could read any of the road names ...
... and the more detailed map of the Watford area ...
...does not show individual stops but gives a general list to include "Town Centre".
As you can tell from the liner of route map, the W30 doe NOT serve Beechen Grove, despite Intalink's helpful suggestion that it does. But Hertfordshire also give us a "which stops" map for the very centre ...
The W30 no longer serves T, F and M and there is no L on the map! You would need to find your way to Stop H to catch your bus to Croxley Park.
Good, innit?
Keen and perceptive readers of this blog may wish to consider the difference between RED numbers and BLACK ditto on the local route maps ...
... but we will postpone that intellectual exercise until tomorrow's blog.
From The Bachmann Catalogue
Narrow Minded Modelling
fbb has been taking a look at the massive high quality catalogue produced by Bachmann Europe (owned by the Chinese company, Kader). More than any other recent publication, this lavish presentation of the company's full range illustrates the modern model industry.
Until recently, if you wanted to make a good model of, say, a typical Welsh "little train", it was a case of kits and hand bashed accessories. But now you can buy almost everything ready-to-run - at a price. The Baldwin loco above is a real beaut; built to the OO scale of 4mm to the foot and running on 9mm track it is of a standard that the old scratch builders would struggle to achieve.
At a little over three inches long, it will cost you £160.
A typical bogie wagon ...
... with working sliding doors is £39. Also from Bachmann are some buildings typical of Wales, made of plastic slate. Of course ANY OO scale building can be used, but the particular style is ideal for your typical line in the Principality.
Again, these are not cheap, nowhere near as cheap as the Airfix kits of fbbs teenage years or even the same models now sold by Dapol. The three models across the top of the above page are:-
Coal Store £20; Water Tower £20 and Loco Shed £45. The Airfix/Dapol loco shed ...
... is about £9 but you have to glue it and paint it yourself.
Other manufacturers are also producing narrow gauge models, locos from Heljan and Peco, and wagons and coaches from Peco.
fbb is quietly jealous because, IF, when he restarted his modelling activity, stuff like the above was available, he might well have built a narrow gauge layout after breaking into the piggy bank. Hmm! Perhaps a good thing that he started with OO gauge second hand stuff!
Next W30 blog : Thursday 25th March
I'm struggling to restrain myself . . . but restrain myself I will until fbb concludes his W30 blog. In the meantime, I'll give him a clue about W30 . . . Section 106.
ReplyDeleteAs you can tell from the line of route map, the W30 *does* serve Beechen Grove, but as the red route numbers imply, not all day. In fact, reference to the timetable (found in seconds after googling "Bus Times W30") shows it there every 15 minutes after 1624...
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