The Model

Pete Waterman had promised himself to build a model railway for over thirty years, but time was never on his side.  Whilst taking a break from ‘Pop Idol’ he filmed a series for Channel 4 ‘Pete Waterman on Trains’.  The last show was filmed on Leamington Spa Station, which was where Pete had started his spotting days in 1953. 

It was during a running session at a club in North Wales, with his mates from Manchester, that the idea was born.  Leamington is a scale model of that station in the 50’s. The aim was to push the skills of the modellers to the max.

From the beginning it was plain to see that it would have to be mostly scratch built.  The layout was all planned on cad by Mike Raithby and then printed full size and fitted to the baseboards.  The boards and all the building work were carved out by Dave Douglas.  We always knew it would be a monster task and that if we didn’t think things through properly people would lose interest and it would never get built.

Leamington had two stations, the LMS side was the Avenue and the GWR side the General, to make this work we split one side of the room down the middle, as we had another side we made this the West Coast Mainline at Brinklow.  The idea being that if you don’t want to watch Great Western you can run the layout from here. From the start we made the decision to go DCC and to have one line, the down LMS DCC/DC with insulation.  At the beginning we put all the main tack in, to give us four running tracks so we could run stuff quick.  After a few months of playing trains, we started.  First we closed the GWR, fitted points and started the wiring. Geoff Holt built all the Points from Cad Drawings using C+L Finescale Kits, at this time Les Fram got to grips with the DCC.  We chose Zimo.  In 2005 we were up and running on the GWR then we closed the LMS and just ran GWR.  We completed all the tack and electrics in 2007.  As Geoff and Les got on with their tasks, the other members started the scenics.  It was obvious that we needed to do big things that had an impact and then we would look at the fine detail in the future.  There was no way that we could leave out the bridges in the town centre, so Jason Bromby built these for us.  So we started Hatton Bank.