It's 1983, the sun is shining as it always does and I'm spending most of my school holidays chasing Peaks and Rats throughout the Midlands. BR corporate blue still rules, but slowly and steadily a variety of liveries are beginning to emerge. Summer Saturdays brought with them rare haulage, or at least something a little farther from the norm! The same familiar faces are all doing the same moves on services and reliefs to the coast! Skegness, Yarmouth, Scarborough and Blackpool all see their fair percentage of bashers throughout the summer as services are worked in by the last of the 25s and the 40s, rare and non boilered 37s and 47s and 20s a plenty! MK1 and MK2 stock has heads sticking out of most windows and often the opportunity to travel first class as cobbled rakes had their first class de-classified.-  Little did we know or realise back then that these Halcyon days were not going to last too many more years - if only I had photographed more of what I saw!

Well, a group of like minded individuals from Darlington Model Railway club got together and wanted to produce something that would be instantly recognisable from their youth, so plans were drawn up for a huge 35 foot by 16 foot main line exhibition layout based in the North-east during the 80s. This Layout named 'Quaker Lane' has been 4 years in the planning and building but because of the sheer size is still some way off the exhibition circuit. (We estimate 6 to 7 years!!) The members had decided that the layout should be DCC and that as much effort as humanely possible should be given to correct detail when it came to the stock and formations.

Check out the website to see progress:

So whats all this got to do with Thorne Yard.............................

Well TY was born out of the frustration in waiting for the club's layout to be completed. It was been designed to be built in under a year and exhibited at the Darlington exhibition, fully finished in December 2008. (It made it - not fully finished but 75% of the way there!)

 

 The premise of the layout is that Thorne Yard, or the part of it that is modelled, is the small wagon repair/departmental depot that belongs to the larger yard lieing quarter of a mile down the line. The workshops handle a variety a wagons, often cripples tripped in from the Yard, but also undertake refurbishing, scrapping and servicing of the P.Way fleet. Thus allowing for some of the weird and wonderful oddments that were still to be found over the network. The complex here also holds an overflow stabling point where locos may be refuelled in between turns. Being set around the Midlands does offer great scope for locomotive sitings on the layout, and I'll show you my loco books from back in the day if you don't believe that it was there!

 

There is nothing too outstanding in the construction with the baseboards being a mixture of softwood and ply. The trackwork is hand built using C&L components and the scenery follows time honoured methods. The layout is controlled with NCE products with all locos fitted with lok-sound decoders and soumd files from South West Digital or Howes!

 

The real reason for building the layout was to recreate how I remeber the railways back in my spotting days:-

DIRTY, NOISY and full of ATMOSPHERE

You can see the development of the layout on RMWeb by clicking this link: Thorne Yard on RMWeb